Washington, DC – The United States is in the planning stage on the decision to send vaccines to other countries, and hence no quantity has been sanctioned for going to India or any other country, according to Jalina Porter, the Principal Deputy Spokesperson at the State Department.
Answering a question from IAT (Tejinder Singh), Spokesperson Porter told Journalists on Wednesday (May 19) during the daily State Department briefing, “The United States will send 80 million U.S. vaccines to help countries battling the pandemic by the end of June of this year.”
Elaborating Porter said, “This equates to all that’s manufactured – 60 million AstraZeneca vaccine doses – as soon as they’re reviewed by the FDA, as well as another 20 million doses that are authorized for use in the United States. We’ll continue to donate from our excess supply as that supply is delivered to us.”
On the allotment to various countries, Porter added, “As far as distribution, we’ll have more to say about how they’re distributing the vaccines in the coming weeks.”
The United States recently advised its citizens to leave India as soon as possible as the country battles a devastating second coronavirus wave.
India has been breaking global records with daily new infections and single-day death tolls. With visual reports of dead bodies floating down the rivers like the Ganges and the Yamuna, the rural population is exponentially affected by the epidemic.
Moreover, the Level 4 “do not travel” advisory, the highest of its kind issued by the Department of State, reflected the severity of the problem in India.
Tejinder Singh, Editor, India America Today & White House Correspondent