China is winning at COVID vaccine diplomacy. We need Sens. Moran and Marshall’s help
On March 15, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions advanced the PREVENT Pandemics Act with strong bipartisan support, including from Kansas Sens. Jerry Moran and Roger Marshall. Despite the bill having important provisions for public health response and preparedness, it lacks one key factor: preventing the emergence of new COVID-19 variants to end the current pandemic. Bipartisan conversations around a new COVID-19 budget supplemental have begun. Still, they lack Republican support for global pandemic relief. Sens. Moran and Marshall’s failure to intervene and support new funding to vaccinate the world is not only utterly morally unacceptable and enormously ineffective, but it will also continue the COVID-19 crisis.
The at least $5 billion requested by the White House for global COVID-19 relief makes sure that the funds are used for purchasing vaccines and administering them. As long as there are billions of unvaccinated people in underserved countries, the United States will be vulnerable to wave after wave of new infections. Some will be more deadly, and some will be more infectious. Some will be both. Until everyone in the world who wants a vaccine can get it, we are all at risk, and that’s especially true of our most vulnerable: the elderly, cancer survivors, the immunocompromised and the uninsured.
We are gambling with COVID-19, and we are not winning. New variants have already put China under new lockdowns. The coronavirus is surging worldwide again, and the BA.2 omicron variant is now the most dominant strain in the United States. More variants will come, and no other solution gets America back to normal faster than vaccinating the world.
The U.S. has thus far pledged to donate 1.2 billion doses, but only 511 million have been donated or are in transit. China has delivered nearly 5 out of the 11 billion and is influencing African political and economic drivers with vaccine diplomacy as the world’s largest exporter of COVID-19 vaccines. China has declared a policy to provide an additional 2 billion doses and another 1 billion doses to Africa in the next two years. In total, 1.76 billion doses have been sold with a strings-attached deal, 222 million donated, and a total of 1.41 billion delivered. The strings-attached contract could stipulate that countries receiving the vaccines must join China’s “Belt and Road” infrastructure development initiative, which further hinders America’s influence on the African continent. The Japan Times and Chinese state media also report the same.
But the vaccines China is using to gain more leverage globally are substantially less effective against the latest variants. Getting vaccines to everyone who wants them will get us to global herd immunity, significantly reducing the chances of emerging variants. The U.S.-backed, Food and Drug Administration-approved vaccines are proven to be more effective against omicron than the Sinovac and other vaccines made with inactivated virus. On the other hand, as noted by a bipartisan group led by Sens. Tina Smith and Lisa Murkowski, Russia has signed agreements to send more than 700 million shots to more than 50 countries in Latin America and Asia — but Russia is in no position to fill those needs. FDA-approved mRNA vaccines are not only the most potent weapons to combat emerging COVID-19 variants — they are also our only shot out of this pandemic while delivering no-strings-attached humanitarian assistance to allies across the world by stopping the variants.
Sens. Moran and Marshall should use their powerful positions to pledge at least $5 billion the White House has requested to vaccinate the world. Debates on the Republican side of Congress’ failure to pass a COVID-19 budget supplemental focused on unspent funds from previous rounds of pandemic relief. That understandable concern was entirely misplaced about the $5 billion portions of the funds intended for global vaccinations. According to business and military experts from the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, fewer than 0.34% of all previous COVID-19 packages have been directed toward international relief. Politicized debates regarding offsets and repurposing unspent money from previous relief overlook emergency supplemental funds, which are, by definition, without offsets. Passing an emergency budget supplemental to vaccinate the world will not hinder that debate about repurposing unspent money. Simply put: There are no unspent funds on the global side of the COVID-19 ledger.
Without global herd immunity, policymakers must anticipate new rounds of mask mandates, school closures and social distancing measures. Sens. Moran and Marshall should intervene to depoliticize the emergency COVID-19 supplemental debate and move towards an emergency supplemental — especially for global access to vaccines. We need our senators to break the deadlock and include at least $5 billion in funding for global vaccines that ensure we end COVID-19 variants and safely move away from lockdowns and mandates. They should join the bipartisan negotiating group and fight for a quick resolution that exempts global vaccines from offsets and gets this bill across the finish line before Easter.