WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden called on world leaders at Thursday’s COVID-19 summit to resume a backlog of international commitment to attack the virus as he led the United States in marking the “tragic phase” of 1 million deaths in the United States. He ordered the flags to be lowered in half and warned of complacency around the world.
“This pandemic is not over,” Biden said at the second global pandemic summit. He spoke solemnly about the once unthinkable fees in the United States: “1 million empty chairs around the family dinner table.”
The coronavirus has killed more than 999,000 people in the United States and at least 6.2 million people worldwide since it appeared in late 2019, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University. Other figures, including the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association and the American Nurses Association, show 1 million.
“Today we are celebrating a tragic milestone here in the United States, 1 million deaths from COVID,” he said.
The president has urged Congress to urgently provide billions of dollars in testing, vaccines and treatments, something lawmakers are reluctant to provide so far.
This lack of funding – Biden has demanded an additional $ 22.5 billion in what he calls critically needed money – is a reflection of US hesitant determination, which threatens the global pandemic response, he said.
Eight months after using the first COVID summit to announce an ambitious promise to donate 1.2 billion doses of vaccine to the world, the urgency of the United States and other nations to respond has diminished.
The impetus for vaccinations and treatments has faded, even as more and more infectious variants increase and billions of people around the world remain vulnerable.
Biden addressed the opening of the virtual summit on Thursday morning with notes and said that tackling COVID-19 “must remain an international priority”. The United States is hosting the meeting along with Germany, Indonesia, Senegal and Belize.
“This summit is an opportunity to renew our efforts to keep our feet on gas when it comes to tackling this pandemic and preventing future health crises,” Biden said.
According to the State Department, the United States has sent nearly 540 million doses of vaccine to more than 110 countries and territories – far more than any other donor nation.
Leaders have announced about $ 3 billion in new commitments to fight the virus, along with a number of new programs designed to increase access to vaccines and treatments worldwide. But this was a much more modest result than last year’s meeting.
After more than 1 billion vaccines have been delivered to the developing world, the problem is no longer the lack of vaccines, but the logistical support for receiving doses into weapons. According to government figures, more than 680 million donated vaccines have remained unused in developing countries because they have expired and cannot be given quickly enough. As of March, 32 poorer countries had used less than half of their COVID-19 vaccines.
U.S. aid to promote and facilitate vaccinations abroad dried up earlier this year, and Biden asked for about $ 5 billion for efforts for the rest of the year.
“We have tens of millions of unclaimed doses because countries lack the resources to build their own refrigeration chains, which are primarily refrigeration systems, to fight disinformation and to hire vaccinators,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said this week. She added that the summit “will be an opportunity to raise the fact that we need additional funding to continue to be part of these efforts around the world.”
“We will continue to fight for more funding here,” Psaki said. “But we will continue to put pressure on other countries to do more to help the world make progress.
Congress has opposed the cost of easing COVID-19 and has so far refused to accept the package due to political opposition to the impending end of migration restrictions from the US-Mexico pandemic era. Even after a brief consensus on virus funding emerged in March, lawmakers decided to eliminate global aid funding and focus aid solely on securing U.S. supplies of booster vaccines and therapies.
Biden warned that without Congress, the United States could lose access to the next generation of vaccines and treatments, and that the nation would not have enough supplies of booster doses or the antiviral drug Paxlovid for later this year. He also warned that more options would emerge if the United States and the world did not do more to curb the virus worldwide.
“To defeat the pandemic here, we must defeat it everywhere,” Biden said last September during the first global summit.
Demand for COVID-19 vaccines has fallen in some countries as infections and deaths have declined worldwide in recent months, especially as the omicron variant has been shown to be less severe than earlier versions of the disease. For the first time since its inception, UN-supported COVAX efforts have “enough to enable countries to meet their national vaccination targets,” according to Dr. Seth Berkeley, chief executive of the Gavi Vaccines Alliance, which is before COVAX.
And yet, although more than 65% of the world’s population receives at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, less than 16% of people in poor countries are immunized. Countries are unlikely to meet the World Health Organization’s goal of vaccinating 70% of all people by June.
In countries including Cameroon, Uganda and Côte d’Ivoire, workers are struggling to get enough refrigerators to transport vaccines, send enough syringes for mass campaigns and get enough health workers to inject vaccines. Experts also point out that more than half of the health workers needed to administer vaccines in poorer countries are either underpaid or underpaid.
Giving more vaccines, critics say, would be meaningless.
“It’s like donating a bunch of fire trucks to countries that burn but don’t have water,” said Ritu Sharma, vice president of the charity CARE, which has helped immunize people in more than 30 countries, including India, South Sudan and Bangladesh. .
“We can’t give states all these vaccines, but we can’t use them,” she said, adding that the same infrastructure that gives injections in the United States is now needed elsewhere. “We had to deal with this problem in the United States, so why don’t we use this knowledge now to provide vaccines to the people who need them most?”
Sharma said more investment is needed to counter vaccine fluctuations in developing countries, where there are established beliefs about the potential dangers of Western-made drugs.
Berkeley of Gavi also said that countries increasingly want more expensive RNA vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna, which are not as readily available as the AstraZeneca vaccine, which accounted for most of COVAX’s supplies last year.
Variants such as delta and omicron have led many countries to switch to mRNA vaccines, which appear to provide greater protection and are more in demand worldwide than traditionally produced vaccines such as those in China and Russia.
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Cheng reported from London. AP writer Chris Megerian contributed.
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