The White House held a four-hour virtual summit to improve global vaccination rates. “To beat the pandemic at home, we must beat it everywhere,” President Biden said in his opening speech. The meeting at the summit was attended by Canada, Indonesia, South Africa and the United Kingdom, and was joined by the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The Director-General stressed that the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed millions of lives since early 2020, “every helping hand is needed during the crisis”.
A senior US government official clarified before the official White House announcement that vaccines made by Pfizer and BioNTech will be manufactured in the United States and will begin shipping to low-, middle- and low-income countries from January 2022.
The COVAX program, backed by the World Health Organization and the Global Alliance for Vaccines Dissemination and Immunization (GAVI), has so far delivered more than 286 million doses of the vaccine to 141 countries, according to GAVI.
Cover Photo: Getty Images
