The US appears to be dragging its feet over lifting its ban on export of raw materials used for making the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine which is the mainstay of India’s inoculation campaign to fight the surging second coronavirus.
The US has to first take care of the requirements of its own people, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in response to a question from a journalist on the requests made from India to lift the ban. "We have a special responsibility to the American people," Price said.
"It's, of course, not only in our interest to see Americans vaccinated, it's in the interests of the rest of the world to see Americans vaccinated," he added.
As for the rest of the world, "We will, of course, always do as much as we can, consistent with our first obligation," Price remarked.
India's External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar had discussed the issue with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken last week and this had raised hopes that Washington would lift the ban to allow the export of vaccine raw materials to the Pune-based Serum Institute of India for producing anti-Covid vaccines.
Earlier this month, Serum Institute (SII) CEO Adar Poonawala had appealed to Biden to allow the exports of vaccine raw materials. "If we are to truly unite in beating this virus, on behalf of the vaccine industry outside the US, I humbly request you to lift the embargo of raw material exports out of the US so that vaccine production can ramp up," he tweeted.
India has also become the world's main supplier of vaccines and has been exporting both the AstraZeneca vaccine as well as its homegrown Covaxin vaccine developed by the Indian Council of Medical Research and Bharat Biotech.
He said, "When it comes to India, there is the arrangement with the Quad which includes increasing production capacity in India."
He was referring to the Indo-Pacific Quad summit attended by US President Joe Biden and Prime Ministers Narendra Modi of India, Yoshihide Suga of Japan and Scott Morrison of Australia. The summit had agreed on an arrangement for vaccines to be manufactured by India with US and Japanese funding and Australia pitching in with logistics under the programme.
Under the Quad arrangement, Washington is keen to promote the Johnson& Johnson vaccine and the Novavax vaccine that is close to getting approval. Both are being produced by US companies.
Biden's spokesperson Jen Psaki last week had also sidestepped a question about lifting the ban on vaccine raw materials, choosing to speak instead about the reaction of USTR Katherine Tai to the request from India and South Africa for waiving the intellectual property rights for vaccines.
