Canada, Mexico to share U.S.-donated COVID-19 vaccines as Three Amigos summit begins
Global News
COVID-19 vaccine sharing is top of mind as the leaders of the United States, Canada and Mexico meet for the Three Amigos summit in Washington.
Canada and Mexico will redistribute millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses they received from the United States to other Western Hemisphere countries as a part of Thursday’s revived Three Amigos leaders’ summit.
Senior U.S. government officials outlined the measure in advance of Thursday’s meeting that President Joe Biden is hosting at the White House with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity as authorized briefers, offered advance details of the American priorities ahead of the first North American leaders’ summit since Canada hosted the last one five years ago.
Among those leaders only Trudeau remains, but an initiative that he announced with former U.S. president Barack Obama in Ottawa in 2016 is being revived by Biden – a North American working group on violence against Indigenous women and girls.
The three leaders will also look at strengthening trilateral co-operation on the Western Hemisphere’s unprecedented migration crisis that has seen millions of asylum seekers from Central America crashing Mexico’s borders while Venezuela’s economic and political crisis is expected to produce six million refugees by the end of the year.
The overarching theme of the summit is joining forces to rebuild after the COVID-19 pandemic and make the North American continent more resilient and self-sustaining against global supply chain bottlenecks.
The plan for Canada and Mexico to share their American-supplied excess vaccines is part of that economic rebuilding plan. When the U.S. loaned Canada and Mexico millions of vaccines there was an agreement that they “would pay those forward” to regional partners, said one official.
The exact details of the distribution are to be worked out later by public health experts, said the officials.