WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden is expected to fall short of his commitment to ship 80 million covid-19 vaccine doses abroad by the end of June because of regulatory and other hurdles, officials said Monday as they announced new plans for sharing the shots globally.
The news comes as the U.S. sees covid-19 deaths dip below 300 a day for the first time since the early days of the pandemic in March 2020.
The White House announced the final allocations for the donated doses, with 60 million shots going to the global Covax vaccine-sharing alliance and 20 million being directed to specific partners. But fewer than 10 million doses have been shipped around the world, including 2.5 million doses delivered to Taiwan over the weekend and about 1 million doses delivered to Mexico, Canada and South Korea earlier this month.
Officials said that while the U.S.-produced doses are ready, deliveries have been delayed because of legal, logistical and regulatory requirements in the U.S. and the recipient countries.
"What we've found to be the biggest challenge is not actually the supply -- we have plenty of doses to share with the world -- but this is a Herculean logistical challenge," said White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
Psaki said shipments will go out as soon as countries are ready to receive them and the administration sorts out logistical complexities, including vaccination supplies such as syringes and alcohol prep pads, cold storage for the doses, customs procedures and even language barriers.
The doses are not needed in the U.S., where demand for vaccinations has plummeted in recent weeks as more than 177 million Americans have received at least one shot.
On May 17, Biden announced that "over the next six weeks, the United States of America will send 80 million doses overseas. This will be more vaccines than any country has actually shared to date -- five times more than any other country [and] more than Russia and China, which have donated 15 million doses."
Earlier this month, Biden announced that on top of the 80 million, the U.S. is purchasing 500 million doses from Pfizer to donate globally over the coming year, with the first deliveries expected in August.
Biden initially committed to providing other nations with all 60 million U.S.-produced doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has yet to be authorized for use in the U.S. but is widely approved around the world. The AstraZeneca supply has been held up for export by a weekslong safety review by the Food and Drug Administration.
Given declining domestic demand, Biden was expected to be able to meet the full 80 million-dose commitment without the AstraZeneca supply. The White House unveiled plans earlier this month for the first 25 million doses for export from existing federal stockpiles of Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, and some have already begun shipping.
On Monday, the U.S. revealed plans for 55 million more doses.
Through Covax, the latest batch of doses will include about 14 million for Latin America and the Caribbean, approximately 16 million for Asia and about 10 million for Africa. About 14 million doses will be shared directly with numerous countries.
[Video not showing up above? Click here to watch » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDGue6eqor0]
VACCINATION MILESTONE
In the U.S., the drive to put shots into arms hit another milestone Monday: 150 million Americans fully vaccinated.
The coronavirus was the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2020, behind heart disease and cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But now, as the outbreak loosens its grip, it has fallen down the list of the biggest killers.
CDC data suggests that more Americans are dying every day from accidents, chronic lower respiratory diseases, strokes or Alzheimer's disease than from covid-19.
The U.S. death toll has topped 602,000, according to Johns Hopkins University, while the worldwide count is close to 3.9 million. But the real figures are believed to be markedly higher.
About 45% of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. More than 53% of Americans have received at least one dose. But the slumping U.S. demand for shots has disappointed public health experts.
Dr. Ana Diez Roux, dean of Drexel University's school of public health, said the dropping rates of infections and deaths are cause for celebration. But she cautioned that the virus still has a chance to spread and mutate given the low vaccination rates in some states, including Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Wyoming and Idaho.
"So far it looks like the vaccines we have are effective against the variants that are circulating," Diez Roux said. "But the more time the virus is jumping from person to person, the more time there is for variants to develop, and some of those could be more dangerous."
New cases are running at about 11,400 a day, down from more than a quarter-million per day in early January. Average deaths per day are down to about 293, according to Johns Hopkins, after topping out above 3,400 in mid-January.
In New York, which suffered mightily in spring 2020, Gov. Andrew Cuomo tweeted Monday that the state had 10 new deaths. At the height of the outbreak in the state, nearly 800 people per day were dying from the coronavirus.
Some states are faring worse than others. Missouri leads the nation in per-capita covid-19 cases and is fourth behind California, Florida and Texas in the number of new cases per day over the past week despite its significantly smaller population.
The surge is being driven by new cases in a farming region in the northern part of the state and in the southwest corner, which includes the towns of Branson and Springfield. As of Friday, covid-19 hospitalizations in southwest Missouri had risen 72% this month.
The fall will bring new waves of infection, but they will be less severe and will be concentrated more in places with low vaccination rates, said Amber D'Souza, a professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health.
"So much depends on what happens over the summer and what happens with children," D'Souza said. "Anyone who is not vaccinated can become infected and transmit the virus."
Information for this article was contributed by Zeke Miller, Michael Kunzelman and Carla K. Johnson of The Associated Press.