COVID-19 VACCINES: WASHINGTON- U.S. to Donate 20 Million Doses for Global Vaccination Effort

© Doug Mills/The New York Times

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“We know America will never be fully safe until the pandemic that’s raging globally is under control,” Mr. Biden said during a news conference at the White House. “No ocean’s wide enough, no wall is high enough, to keep us safe.”

Mr. Biden’s announcement on Monday afternoon came not long after a World Health Organization news conference at which the director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that countries with high vaccination rates had to do more to help countries that were being hit hard by the coronavirus, or the entire world would be imperiled.

“There is a huge disconnect growing where, in some countries with the highest vaccination rates, there appears to be a mind-set that the pandemic is over, while others are experiencing huge waves of infection,” Dr. Tedros said.

Dr. Tedros’s comments came shortly after the United States and Britain, which have seen a decline in cases and deaths in recent weeks, relaxed restrictions as the virus battered India and other Asian countries.

Variants like B.1.617, first discovered in India and recently designated a variant of concern by the W.H.O., are contributing to the spread of infections and worry many researchers.

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Dr. Tedros called for well-supplied nations to send more of their vaccine supplies and allocations to harder-hit countries, and for vaccine developers and manufacturers to hasten delivery of hundreds of millions of doses to Covax, an international initiative dedicated to equitable distribution of the vaccine, noting an appeal by Henrietta Fore, UNICEF’s executive director.

Ms. Fore released a statement on Monday saying that Covax would soon complete delivering 65 million doses, but that it should have delivered at least 170 million and that the effort could be short by as much as 190 million doses by the time Group of 7 leaders gather in England in June.

“We have issued repeated warnings of the risks of letting down our guard and leaving low- and middle-income countries without equitable access to vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics,” Ms. Fore wrote. “We are concerned that the deadly spike in India is a precursor to what will happen if those warnings remain unheeded.”

The vaccine shortage in many countries is compounded by the situation in India, Ms. Fore wrote, a global leader in vaccine production.

Mr. Biden said that America’s contribution of 80 million doses would be the most of any country, by five times.

“Just as in World War II America was the arsenal of democracy, in the battle against the Covid-19 pandemic our nation’s going to be the arsenal of vaccines for the rest of the world,” Mr. Biden said. “We’ll share these vaccines in the service of ending the pandemic everywhere.”

Mr. Biden said the vaccines would be shipped by the end of June, when the U.S. would have enough vaccine on hand for all of its citizens.

There is already a glut of vaccine in the U.S., and President Biden and his administration face a different problem: convincing the remaining unvaccinated people to get the shot.

Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its guidance to allow people who have been vaccinated to forgo their masks indoors and outdoors in many situations. The decision caused confusion in states and individuals, some who were eager to return to a semblance of normalcy and others who said they planned to stay masked indefinitely.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of C.D.C., said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the agency’s suggestions were “not permission to shed masks for everybody, everywhere.”

On Monday, Dr. Tedros’s message was more straightforward.

“No one is safe until we are all safe,” he said.