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Biden pledges up to $4 billion to help get poorer countries vaccinated against COVID-19
Feb 20, 2021 1 min, 46 secs

In a reversal of his predecessor's U.S.-centric approach to tackling the coronavirus pandemic, President Biden is ramping up pressure on America's wealthiest allies Friday to get COVID-19 vaccine doses into poor and developing countries.

would contribute up to $4 billion to COVAX, the World Health Organization-backed initiative aimed at ensuring equitable access to vaccines around the world.

President Biden was committing $2 billion to COVAX up front — which is $2 billion more than the U.S.

That's a point that global health experts have been stressing for months: If rich nations focus only on protecting their own populations from the disease it will be more than a moral failure — it will allow the virus to mutate unchecked, and that could come back to haunt even well-vaccinated countries.

"The longer the virus is allowed to continue in a context of patchy immunity, the greater the chance of mutations that could render the vaccines we have and the vaccines some people in rich countries have already received, less effective or ineffective," she said.

Byanyima also cited research carried out for the International Chamber of Commerce, which suggests that delaying poor countries access to vaccines will cost money, to the tune of, "an estimated $9 trillion, with nearly half of this absorbed in wealthy countries like the United States, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom.".

Health experts have said the variant, like the one discovered in southern England, is far more easily transmitted between people, but vaccine studies have shown the South African variant also appears to render the current vaccines at least somewhat less effective

The current goal of COVAX is to get 2 billion vaccine doses distributed by the end of this year, fairly, to the countries most in need

"I welcome that world leaders are stepping up to the challenge by making new commitments to effectively end this pandemic by sharing doses and increasing funds to COVAX," he said, adding that, "to prevent virus variants from undermining our health technologies and hampering an already sluggish global economic recovery, it is critical that leaders continue to step up to ensure that we end this pandemic as quickly as possible."

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