US Hoarding Millions of Surplus Vaccine Doses as COVID-19 Engulfs India

While more than 20 million Indians have been infected with the new coronavirus, the United States continues to hoard COVID-19 vaccine doses, despite warnings against the risk of coronavirus variants on the effectiveness of the inoculations.

US President Joe Biden has repeatedly said his administration would help the rest of the world only after all Americans have access to vaccines, drawing condemnation from global health experts and advocates who slam his position as “increasingly untenable” amid India's deepening COVID-19 crisis and a growing global chasm in vaccination rates.

On Tuesday, India reported 357,229 new cases over the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 20.28 million.

The country’s COVID-19 death toll also rose by 3,449 to 222,408, according to Indian Health Ministry data.

Meanwhile, medical experts say the actual figures in India could be five to 10 times higher than those reported.

The crisis has left India’s healthcare system completely overwhelmed and hospitals emptied of medical oxygen vital for the survival for those infected.

Even wood used in funeral pyres is in shortage.

The surge in cases comes amid a dramatic drop in vaccinations, due to problems with supplies and delivery.

The crisis has drawn attention to the unequal access to vaccines.

According to Our World in Data, around 43% of Americans have received at least one dose, compared with less than 9% of India’s population.

The World Health Organization says more than one billion vaccine doses have been administered globally, but 82% of shots have been given in high- and middle-income countries and just 0.3% in low-income nations.

“It is an apartheid,” Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS, said in a briefing last week hosted by the ONE Campaign, an anti-poverty and global health nonprofit.

The US faces mounting pressure to take a range of steps to expand vaccine access, including sharing more of its doses.

Rep. Tom Malinowski, a former State Department official, said on Monday the US would not use its AstraZeneca vaccine supply so it should share all of it with India and other countries “the moment that can be safely done.”

The US will have adequate vaccine doses to meet the US demand for vaccines in mid-to-late May, according to an April 20 analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the NYU School of Medicine in New York City, warned that the longer the Biden administration postponed sharing its vaccine surplus, the greater the risk would be that more virulent coronavirus variants emerge and circle back to hit the US population.

In January, at the 2021 Executive Board session of the World Health Organization, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described the hoarding of COVID-19 vaccines by wealthy countries as a “catastrophic moral failure.”

This hoarding has continued, and by mid-March, 14 percent of the world’s population had access to more than half its vaccines.

American magazine The Atlantic cited Duke University’s Institute of Global Health as saying that the US had “secured more doses than it will ever need.”

The Atlantic also warned that the crisis in India would affect adjacent countries who were counting on vaccines from India, which is home to the world’s largest vaccine maker, the Serum Institute.

The Serum Institute is one of the biggest providers to COVAX, the international initiative that aims to equalize vaccine distribution around the world.

“It’s kind of a domino effect: One country’s crisis is every country’s crisis. Because what happens in India doesn’t stay there — not just with variants, but also with vaccines,” the Atlantic said.