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>https://www.csis.org/analysis/shot-heard-around-world

The Shot Heard around the World

The Strategic Imperative of U.S. Covid-19 Vaccine Diplomacy

November 17, 2021

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Executive Summary

In 2020, the United States won the global race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine. But that historic victory could become a historical footnote if the United States loses the race to deliver its vaccines to the rest of the globe.

Vaccine diplomacy has never been more important. Every nation on earth will be watching to see who will rise to the challenge and reap the rewards of global leadership. The United States now has an opportunity to deploy its scientific and economic preeminence in the service of all humanity. The United States has the ability to shield developing nations not only from the virus, but from the designs of competing powers. Yet, to date, the United States has been slow to seize this opportunity, and international rivals—especially China—are eagerly filling the gap created by its inaction.

Vaccines have been widely available throughout the United States for many months and to vulnerable groups for almost a year. Yet elsewhere in the world, billions of people are still without access to any shots and are desperate for help. Vaccine-rich nations such as the United States have a humanitarian responsibility to help bring everyone else out of the pandemic as well; inoculating the world is a moral duty.

In addition to a humanitarian obligation to deliver vaccines around the world, the United States has sound strategic and competitive reasons to do so.

In the absence of U.S. leadership, desperate nations are turning to Beijing, which is offering inferior vaccines in exchange for foreign-policy concessions. Meanwhile, at the World Trade Organization (WTO), a group of nations is proposing that countries agree to strip vaccine makers of their patents, copyrights, and trade secrets—the intellectual property (IP) underlying the products and processes they invented, including the vaccines themselves and the technology that produces them. Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris administration has endorsed this idea, which would surrender national competitive advantages to rival nations without adding a single dose to the global vaccine arsenal.

The real barriers to vaccinating the developing world are not IP protections. Forcing vaccine makers to give up intellectual property will not lower barriers; it will only create new ones, both for today’s global vaccination project and in future pandemics. Rather, a combination of logistical, regulatory, and infrastructure challenges is slowing global vaccination efforts. Fortunately, these are problems U.S. economic resources and technological innovation can readily solve.

Forcing vaccine makers to give up intellectual property will not lower barriers; it will only create new ones, both for today’s global vaccination project and in future pandemics.

The present challenge provides a perfect opportunity for the United States to reassert its leadership role in international affairs and check its rivals’ cynical opportunism.

To the Biden-Harris administration’s credit, the United States has committed to financing or providing 1.1 billion vaccine doses abroad, with most designated for low- and lower-middle-income nations. Of these doses, 160 million have already shipped. The commitment makes the United States the largest single-country donor of any vaccine, ever.

Yet the United States and other wealthy nations can and should give more. The United States, like many prosperous countries, already has a surplus of Covid-19 vaccines, with hundreds of millions of doses in danger of expiring before they can be administered. Washington should collaborate with its allies and industry partners to ship these doses abroad immediately to prevent needless hospitalizations and deaths and help stop the spread. The leading democracies of the Group of Seven (G7) should also develop a comprehensive plan to maximize worldwide production and accelerate distribution to countries in need.

With more than half of all Americans fully vaccinated—and 68 percent of those 12 and above—the United States is slowly winning the fight against the pandemic at home. Smart, aggressive vaccine diplomacy can now help win that fight internationally…

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