COVID urgency in Haiti has Biden administration working on vaccines

‘It’s really bad.’ COVID urgency in Haiti has Biden administration working on vaccines The Biden administration is urgently working to get coronavirus vaccines to Haiti, but is concerned that the country’s weak healthcare infrastructure may not be able to deal with a large shipment, the Miami Herald and the McClatchy Washington Bureau have learned. Miami Herald

The Biden administration is urgently working to get coronavirus vaccines to Haiti, but is concerned that the country’s weak healthcare infrastructure may not be able to deal with a large shipment, the Miami Herald and the McClatchy Washington Bureau have learned.

A White House official said the administration is in “active” conversations with the Haitian government on the complexities of delivering a significant number of U.S. vaccine doses to the country, including Haiti’s storage capacity and the logistics of shipping the vaccines in proper conditions.

But “there is an urgency” within the White House to get doses delivered in short order, the official said.

After reporting few COVID-19 cases and fatalities last year and perplexing the medical community, Haiti is seeing a deadly surge in infections. The list of the dead from COVID read like a who’s who of Haitian society, and new cases are stretching hospital capacity and the country’s oxygen supply. Antiviral treatments, readily available in the United States, remain out of reach, and on an almost weekly basis at least one hospital in the metropolitan Port-au-Prince area announces it is full and cannot accept any more patients..

Meanwhile, testing capacity remains low and the country remains the only one in Latin America and the Caribbean where the government has yet to administer a single shot of a COVID-19 vaccine. A shipment of 132,000 AstraZeneca vaccine doses from the U.N.-backed global sharing program, COVAX, was supposed to arrive on Monday, but has been delayed, the Pan American Health Organization said.

“As a vital part of our commitment to share at least 80 million safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines, the Biden administration is actively engaging with Haitian government officials on how to get vaccines to Haiti as soon as possible,” the White House official said. “While no plans have been finalized, we hope to share more news on our commitment to Haiti in the immediate future.” ...

Concerned that the U.S. and COVAX are not moving fast enough, some Haitians and healthcare advocates are reaching out to hospitals and elected officials in the U.S. asking if they can get access to their extra vaccines. In particular, they are seeking access to some of the millions of doses of Johnson & Johnson vaccine that are set to expire in various states between now and August. ...