Lawmakers: Biden must do more on global vaccines

President Biden announced 500 million additional vaccine doses for the world this week. But advocates and lawmakers are pushing for more.

To truly solve the glaring inequities in global vaccine supply, they say the Biden administration should push vaccine makers to share know-how to allow more countries to make additional doses themselves, and that the government should provide more funding to scale up vaccine manufacturing capacity.

“Donations in and of themselves are a drop in the bucket of global need,” said Max Hadler, COVID-19 senior policy expert at the group Physicians for Human Rights.

“The scale is so much higher than the scale world leaders are talking about right now,” he added.

Lawmakers push for funding: “This is undoubtedly a step in the right direction, but I urge the President to take bolder action as soon as possible,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) said in a statement in response to the announcement of the new donation of Pfizer doses.

Krishnamoorthi helped lead a letter from 116 Democratic lawmakers in August calling for including $34 billion in Democrats’ coming $3.5 trillion package to ramp up global COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing and distribution.