Roving Periscope: on vaccines, Biden apes Trump’s “America First” policy

Virendra Pandit 

New Delhi: Days after hinting to resume export of raw materials India required for manufacturing and delivery of Covid-19 vaccines, the Biden administration took a U-turn, and aped Donald Trump’s “America First” policy, in an apparent bid to arm-twist New Delhi to toe the American line on various issues.

“It is in the world’s interest that Americans are vaccinated and the US has to first take care of the requirements of its own people”, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said on Thursday about Washington’s restrictions on exporting raw materials for making the Covid-19 vaccines.

Asked when would President Joe Biden’s administration decide on the requests to lift the ban on the export of vaccine raw materials to India, Price told reporters bluntly, “We have a special responsibility to the American people.” And, “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,” he declared, media reported.

Last week, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s discussion with his Indian counterpart External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar on Covid-19 and health cooperation had opened the possibility of Washington allowing the export of vaccine raw materials to India.

According to reports, the Biden administration had conveyed to India that it understood New Delhi’s pharmaceutical requirements and promised to give the matter due consideration. It observed that the current difficulty in the export of critical raw materials needed to manufacture vaccines to combat the pandemic was due mainly to an American law that forced local companies to prioritize domestic consumption.

America also clarified that there are no export restrictions on such items and domestic regulations have only prioritized the use of these materials for the production of vaccines in the US. Washington even acknowledged the larger framework of the India-US health cooperation.

In 2020, when the pandemic killed at will, America had invoked the war-time Defence Production Act (DPA), 1950, that forced US companies to prioritize production of Covid-19 vaccines and Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs) for domestic production even if they faced financial loss due to ban on exports.

Recently, Adar Poonawalla, CEO of the Serum Institute of India (SII), had tagged President Biden in a Twitter message requesting to lift the embargo on the export of raw materials to enable India to ramp up vaccine production.

Also, the Indian Ambassador to the US Taranjit Singh Sandhu took up this matter with the Biden administration seeking a smooth supply of certain inputs for vaccine production. The two countries’ officials also discussed ways to ease these supplies.

Now, citing reasons for the U-turn, Price said: “What I will say broadly is that the US first and foremost is engaged in an ambitious and effective and, so far, successful effort to vaccinate the American people. That campaign is well underway, and we’re doing that for a couple of reasons.” “Number one, we have a special responsibility to the American people. Number two, the American people, this country has been hit harder than any other country around the world — more than 550,000 deaths, tens of millions of infections in this country alone,” he said.

The leaders of the Quad – President Biden and Prime Ministers Narendra Modi (India), Yoshihide Suga (Japan), and Scott Morrison (Australia) — had agreed at their virtual summit in March on a joint program to supply Covid-19 vaccines to countries in the Indo-Pacific.

The vaccines manufactured by India with the US and Japanese funding would be distributed with Australian logistics under the program.

Interestingly, America’s U-turn came when the Quad Vaccine Initiative, under which India will manufacture US-developed vaccines like Novavax and Johnson&Johnson’s Janssen as an example of a US-India partnership, has just started functioning.

Last week, Biden’s spokesperson Jen Psaki had also sidestepped a question about lifting the ban on vaccine raw materials.

India has become the world’s main supplier of vaccines because of the license granted to SII by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca for the vaccine developed by them.