Astrazeneca

The Biden administration is desperate for some fresh ideas as they attempt to convince more Americans to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Between White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Rochelle Walensky, we are constantly hearing about the White House’s latest creative ways to encourage people to get vaccinated. The administration seems eager to push the notion that all of the vaccine holdouts are Trump supporters. Unfortunately for them, recent studies suggest otherwise.

Biden’s new-found support for a temporary waiver of COVID vaccine patents raises another fascinating set of questions. World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus makes the case for a waiver in terms of overwhelming priorities and the inequitable distribution of doses to date — 80 percent to the richest countries. Economic pragmatists add that the faster the whole world is vaccinated, the sooner global trade, including demand for exports from the rich West, will also recover.

What follows the global pandemic? The global vaccine freakout. European politicians have their knickers in a twist about the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot. The source of the panic was reports from Denmark and Norway that some people who received the British-made vaccine developed blood clots — though there is no evidence yet that the shot is at fault. Over a dozen European nations, including France, Germany, Ireland and Spain have temporarily suspended their use of Oxford-AstraZeneca, in what seems to be a team effort to mistake correlation for causation. Sometimes the world cries out for American global leadership. The US is currently sitting on a stockpile of around 30 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. AstraZeneca has yet to apply for FDA approval for their shot.