President Joe Biden makes remarks while touring a Pfizer factory in Kalamazoo, Mich., Feb. 19, 2021.
Instead, COVAX has struggled to acquire doses: It stands half a billion short of its goal. Poor countries are dangerously unprotected as the delta variant runs rampant, just the scenario that COVAX was created to prevent. But the Biden donation, worth $3.5 billion, comes with a caveat: To help fund it, the administration is diverting hundreds of millions of dollars promised for vaccination drives in poorer countries, according to notes from a meeting between COVAX and American officials. Short on funding, those countries have had a hard time buying fuel to transport doses to clinics, training people to administer shots or persuading people to get them.
Still, the 163 million doses it has delivered — most free to poorer nations, with the rest to countries like Canada that paid their way — are a far cry from plans to have at least 640 million doses available by now. But if rich nations pledged donations, they did not make obliging partners. Britain negotiated for wealthier participants to be given a choice of vaccines to purchase through COVAX, creating delays, said Kate Elder, senior vaccines policy adviser for Doctors Without Borders’ Access Campaign.
Alakija, who is leading African delivery efforts, said health officials in Africa were scarcely consulted in mid-2020 when the program set an initial target of vaccinating at least 20% of poorer countries’ populations. Alakija recalled that people involved in COVAX had said they believed Africa was at low risk and mass immunizations were unnecessary, a claim a Gavi spokesperson denied.
But behind the scenes, tension was simmering between Pfizer and COVAX, two people familiar with the negotiations said. The company wanted the new doses to go to poorer nations alone. As a global purchasing pool, COVAX insisted on also fulfilling orders from wealthier countries that had been buying directly at higher prices. South Korea, for example, had received Pfizer doses from the program.
A Pfizer spokesperson, Sharon Castillo, said the company had “a collaborative relationship” with COVAX.