While President Trump has vowed to get a coronavirus vaccine to every American by April, prioritizing Americans is not what one of Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force members has in mind.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who has previously written about how he hopes to die at age 75, co-authored a paper in September advocating for the “Fair Priority Model,” which calls for a "fair international distribution of vaccine," rather than "vaccine nationalism."
The model allows the country that produces the vaccine to hold onto enough of a supply to reach a threshold for herd immunity ("Rt below 1"). Beyond that, the model supports distributing the vaccine internationally, which means giving away or selling doses of the vaccine before it's available to every citizen in that country, Emanuel explained to Scientific American. (Fox News)
“Reasonable national partiality does not permit retaining more vaccine than the amount needed to keep the rate of transmission (Rt) below 1, when that vaccine could instead mitigate substantial COVID-19–related harms in other countries that have been unable to keep Rt below 1 through ongoing public-health efforts," states the article titled "An ethical framework for global vaccine allocation."
"Associative ties only justify a government's giving some priority to its own citizens, not absolute priority," the co-authors wrote.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said this summer that the administration’s priority is to “develop and produce enough quantity of safe and effective FDA-approved vaccines and therapeutics for use in the United States.”
Once the needs in the U.S. are met, “those products would be available in the world community according to fair and equitable distributions that we would consult in the international community on," he added.
On Monday, Pfizer and BioNTech announced its phase 3 clinical trial was 90 percent effective.