Biden calls India's Modi, pledging assistance amid dire coronavirus outbreak

President Joe Biden called India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi Monday, pledging assistance amid that country's dire coronavirus outbreak.

President Joe Biden spoke to India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday, pledging U.S. assistance after growing pressure on Washington to help. The U.S. will also share as many as 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine with other countries "as they become available," according to the White House senior adviser for COVID response Andy Slavitt. The White House has not said yet which countries will receive those doses. Public health experts and aid agencies had been urging the Biden administration to start sharing COVID-19 vaccine dose as the U.S. population is increasingly vaccinated, but outbreaks worsen in several other parts of the world -- risking the mutation of new variants and stalling the reopening of the global economy. That's been particularly true of India, which faces an increasingly dire crisis and historic new numbers of cases each day.