The Biden administration had said the United States would be one of the biggest contributors of vaccines for the world, but that doesn’t appear to be true.
A report was recently released by PReP4All, an AIDS advocacy group, and shows that Congress set aside billions for the purposes of investing in vaccine production expansion.
These investments did not happen.
$16 billion was set aside for these purposes and as of right now only $145 million, or >1%, has been spent on the expansion.
The money invested so far was spent mainly on Merck facilities to manufacture Johnson & Johnson vaccines, and there has been numerous delays and other issues with production.
The White House is denying that they never had a plan for global vaccination and is saying most of the funding has already been spent appropriately.
1 billion doses of Johnson & Johnson are expected but they won’t be ready until early 2022.
As new variants come out, experts are worried about the projections. It’s expected that the entire population will finally have access to vaccines in 2023.
Experts worry that eventually a mutation will create a strain that cannot be stopped with vaccines.
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