Tell President Biden: The Clock is Ticking to End COVID-19 For Everyone

Thank you for hosting the Global COVID-19 Summit, where the United States demonstrated tremendous leadership to marshal political will to vaccinate the world, save lives now, and build back better from the COVID-19 pandemic. Resources to achieve these targets must now be allocated quickly to follow through on commitments, accelerate the push for new resources from other nations, and ensure a more equitable response and recovery. We urge you to request Congress provide at least $17 billion in new supplemental funding, to vaccinate the world without diverting funds from other lifesaving development and humanitarian programs. This funding is necessary to end the pandemic and deliver on the first two pillars your leadership established at the Summit by assisting the world in reaching 70 percent vaccine coverage by the middle of 2022 without further diversion of health services, and to save lives now through increased access to other lifesaving tools.

I commend your Administration's bold vision for ending the pandemic in 2022 by achieving three pillars outline at the global Summit: 1) Vaccinate the world, 2) Save lives now, and 3) Build back better. However I remain concerned that there are insufficient resources to deliver on those pillars. The length and severity of the pandemic means that previous U.S. government resources for the global COVID-19 response are expected to be fully expended by early 2022. At the exact moment when the world should be ramping up efforts to achieve 70% vaccination by September 2022, funding for the efforts of the U.S. Global COVID-19 Taskforce will be exhausted. Additionally, the ramp up in vaccine production means that low-and-middle-income countries will soon need to deliver 7.5 times more vaccines a month than ever before, a herculean feat that will only be accomplished with new support for vaccine delivery. 

We are facing an urgent crisis of resources – as vaccine doses meant to end the pandemic arrive in ports, they must be coupled with support for frontline health workers and the health systems that support them to get those shots in arms before they expire. 

New resources are needed to both live up to our commitments and bring the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic to an end. 

The pandemic will not be over for us in the United States until it is over everywhere. Uncontrolled spread can lead to new variants, some that may be resistant to existing vaccines, only further prolonging the deadly pandemic. Continued global instability also threatens our own economic recovery and new strains and outbreaks threaten to quickly squander the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars the U.S. has already invested in its own domestic recovery. Achieving the global targets set at September's Summit not only supports a just and equitable pandemic response, but is also critically important to the U.S.'s health and economic interests.  

An under-resourced global COVID-19 response puts the success of existing global health and development programs at risk if financial and human resources and health systems are stretched beyond their capacity to deliver these critical services and COVID-19 vaccines. Our past global COVID-19 investments have leveraged existing U.S. global health and development ingenuity, platforms and relationships to efficiently and effectively make a tremendous impact on the pandemic, but with funding running out, there is a financial and programmatic cliff ahead.