In the latest Senate package targeted at stopping the coronavirus, U.S. lawmakers dropped nearly all funding for curbing the virus beyond American borders, a move many health experts slammed as dangerously short-sighted.
The money has paid for numerous interventions, including a mass vaccination campaign in the Cameroonian capital that saw hundreds of thousands of people get their first dose, as well as the construction of a COVID-19 care facility in South Africa and the donation of 1,000 ventilators to that country.
“This is a bit of a kick in the teeth to poor countries that were promised billions of vaccines and resources last year in grand pledges made by the G7 and the G20,” said Michael Head, a global health research fellow at Britain’s Southampton University.it’s clear all of those promises have now been broken,” he said, adding that without concerted effort and money to fight COVID-19 in the coming months, the pandemic could persist for years.
Although vaccines are more plentiful this year, many poorer countries have struggled to get shots into arms and hundreds of millions of donated vaccines have either expired, been returned or sat unused. To address those logistical hurdles, U.S. aid has financed critical services in countries across Africa, including the safe delivery of vaccines, training health workers and fighting vaccine misinformation.
“It is a real disappointment that there’s no global funding in this bill,” he said. “This virus knows no borders, and it’s in our national interest to vaccinate the world and protect against possible new variants.”
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