Utah Sen. Mitt Romney is urging the Biden administration to speed up delivery of COVID-19 vaccines to countries in need, noting global rivals China and Russia are using it to advance their political agendas in various nations.
In a letter Thursday to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the first-term Republican expressed concern about the administration’s lack of urgency to distribute vaccines to countries in desperate need.
“While Russia and China have taken action on this matter, the United States appears to still be in the process of deciding what it is going to do. It is necessary that the United States implement a strategy which ensures that the world’s most vulnerable populations have access to the vaccine as soon as possible,” he wrote.
President Joe Biden said the U.S. will ship a total of 80 million doses abroad by the end of June, including an additional 20 million doses announced Monday. Biden said the number is substantially higher than pledges from Russia or China, which he said have donated 15 million doses.
“Now there’s a lot of talk about Russia and China influencing the world with vaccines,” Biden said this week. “We want to lead the world with our values.”
The U.S. will not “use our vaccines to secure favors from other countries,” he said.
Romney said he was “dismayed” to learn from Gayle Smith, State Department coordinator for global COVID-19 response and health security, in a Senate committee hearing last week that the administration is still prioritizing and planning worldwide vaccine distribution.
Meantime, China is using its weight and its own far less effective vaccine to push countries needing the shots to follow China’s political goals, he said.
Romney said Carlos Alberto Madero, Honduras’ chief Cabinet coordinator, told the Financial Times that the country wanted to avoid breaking longstanding ties with Taipei, but warned that access to vaccines was “much more urgent than anything else.”
“If Honduras chooses to change its official recognition from the ‘Republic of China’ to the ‘People’s Republic of China’ due to the effective vaccine diplomacy pushed by the PRC, the U.S. will have failed in its own strategic objectives regarding Taiwan, all because we were not successfully using our resources to aid the world in the fight against COVID,” Romney wrote.
Romney said public and private sector efforts in the U.S. to develop COVID-19 vaccines is one of the great scientific successes of the past decades. Given their success in safely inoculating millions of people, U.S. vaccines will be extremely welcome around the world, he said.
“Facilitating vaccine access to other countries will also increase the resiliency of our neighbors, allies and partners, which is in our national security interests,” he said.
Romney said he was pleased to see the administration commit an additional 20 million doses, but a total 80 million doses is not enough to stymie the pandemic and prevent new variants from reaching the U.S.
He urged the administration to open discussions with countries around the world and implement a strategy for vaccine distribution to those countries, including publishing timelines for vaccine distribution by country.