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The Global VAX initiative, which the administration outlined in December, represents the latest effort to carry out President Biden’s vows to help end the pandemic and restore U.S. health leadership. Those goals are driven by national security and humanitarian concerns, as officials worry that a new variant could emerge in a largely unvaccinated country and quickly circle the globe. The fast-spreading omicron variant, which drove record levels of coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in January, was first detected in southern Africa in November.
According to a Global VAX initiative “field guide” shared with diplomatic contacts, the United States will prioritize countries in sub-Saharan Africa — starting with Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, Eswatini, Ghana, Lesotho, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia — to “receive intensive support” for their vaccination campaigns through in-person staffing, technical assistance and more diplomatic engagement.
Those countries have generally vaccinated fewer than 40 percent of their populations against coronavirus, according to the Our World in Data tracking project at the University of Oxford, but have reported upticks in recent weeks that U.S. officials say show the potential need for global aid.
Under the Global VAX initiative, the U.S. plans to spend more than half of the $510 million staked for the program to boost vaccination efforts in the 11 countries, which could include investments in mobile centers to administer shots, freezers for safe vaccine storage and other supplies, U.S. Agency for International Development officials told The Post. The initiative is focused on ensuring “shots in arms,” amid concern that many low-income countries lack the infrastructure to safely store and administer vaccine doses that have been donated by wealthier nations and global aid groups.
Meanwhile, the administration is eying a second group of nations — which includes Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Kenya and Malawi — as possible future partners in the vaccine program but have yet to make significant commitments. “Those are places that we are assessing how best to support, and believe may have high potential in the medium to longer term,” Atul Gawande, assistant administrator for global health at USAID, said in an interview.
The administration also will continue with an array of smaller investments to support vaccinations, spreading the remaining Global VAX funds across dozens of countries, the officials said. “We’re really ramping up,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, executive director of the USAID covid task force. “What we found very consistently in our outreach is that countries do want doses, they do want to vaccinate, and when they have gotten the resources to do that, they’ve made good progress.”
While the United States has already shipped more than 420 million doses abroad, far more than any other country, public health experts have warned that many donated doses are not being promptly administered because of fragile infrastructure, insufficient resources or vaccine hesitancy, problems that U.S. officials say can be largely addressed with targeted investments and diplomatic engagement.
The slow pace of global shots has also jeopardized the White House and the World Health Organization’s goal of vaccinating 70 percent of the world by midyear, Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged on Monday. Fewer than 17 percent of Africans have received at least one shot of vaccine, according to the University of Oxford data. ...
USAID officials said in an interview that the 11 countries were prioritized because of the “high potential” that targeted support would lead to rapid gains, citing successful pilots in several of the countries. For instance, more than a quarter of the population in Ghana and Uganda has now received at least one shot of a coronavirus vaccine, after national vaccination rates hovered in the single digits for most of 2021, an uptick that officials said they are hoping to build on and replicate in other countries. ...
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