Biden Falls Short on Pledge for U.S. to Be the World’s Vaccine ‘Arsenal,’ Experts Say

Congress appropriated $16 billion to ramp up Covid-19 countermeasures, but a new report found that the Biden administration had spent very little of it on expanding vaccine manufacturing capacity.

WASHINGTON — President Biden, who has pledged to fight the coronavirus pandemic by making the United States the “arsenal of vaccines” for the world, is under increasing criticism from public health experts, global health advocates and even Democrats in Congress who say he is nowhere near fulfilling his promise. Mr. Biden has either donated or pledged about 600 million vaccine doses to other countries — a small fraction of the 11 billion that experts say are needed to slow the spread of the virus worldwide. His administration has also taken steps to expand Covid-19 vaccine manufacturing in the United States and India, and is supporting production in South Africa and Senegal to expand access to locally produced vaccines in Africa. But with the administration now recommending booster doses for vaccinated Americans starting next month, outraged public health experts and many Democrats on Capitol Hill are calling on the president to move more aggressively to scale up global manufacturing. In an analysis to be published on Thursday, the AIDS advocacy group PrEP4All found that the administration had spent less than 1 percent of the money that Congress appropriated for ramping up Covid-19 countermeasures on expanding vaccine manufacturing.