The United States will begin shipping 3.5 million doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine to Argentina this Friday as part of a bilateral agreement between the countries, a White House official said.
The official, who declined to be identified, said the US government would also buy 500 million Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines to be distributed throughout the year in the African Union and 92 low- and middle-income countries.
The official said this would add to the $2 billion given to Kovax, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) plan to distribute supplements to poor countries.
The United States has shared vaccines in recent weeks with other countries including Taiwan, Brazil, El Salvador, Bangladesh, Peru and Pakistan.
The US will also share more vaccines with Haiti, the White House said on Thursday (15), a day after the country received 500,000 doses donated by the US.
US President Joe Biden also said that he is ready to send vaccines to Cuba if he is assured that an international organization will administer them.
In June, the World Bank pledged to increase funds available to purchase and deploy Covid-19 vaccines to $20 billion from an earlier target of $12 billion, citing a sharp increase in overall financing demand from developing countries. .
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Nandita Bose in Washington; Editing by Michael Perry)
