Because supplies of the three U.S.-approved COVID vaccines are steady and nearly half of American adults have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine, this donation won’t impact U.S. vaccine availability.

“I think it’s the right thing to do, and, and I think it will help, but obviously, the need is much greater,” Chris Beyrer, MD, MPH, the Desmond M. Tutu Professor of Public Health and Human Rights at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, tells Verywell. “It can be done, and it should be done.”

Vaccine Diplomacy

The AstraZeneca vaccine doses will not be donated—a move that some are calling “vaccine diplomacy”—until the FDA confirms that all doses to be shared meet its expectations for product quality.

There are 10 million doses awaiting FDA approval, and up to another 50 million doses will later be evaluated and donated, likely in late May or June. The second batch of donations is in various stages of production.

Heading Off Variants

Because the AstraZeneca vaccine requires two doses, 60 million doses will only immunize 30 million people. Given the size of the world population, the donation is small.

Still, Beyrer says “every little bit helps at this point because in most of the world, the United States, the UK, and European countries aside, we are still in a period of extreme vaccine scarcity, with much more need and demand.”

With SARS-CoV-2 virus variants on the rise, vaccination is crucial. Still, global full immunization likely won’t occur until at least sometime in 2023, which Beyrer says “is just too slow of a rollout to head off these variants.”

Scarcity to Surplus

The U.S. “doesn’t need the AstraZeneca vaccine at this point,” Beyrer says—a sentiment echoed by the White House. The U.S. is expected to have hundreds of millions of surplus vaccine doses.

“What’s so striking right now is that after a period of vaccine scarcity in the United States, we’re really reaching a tipping point, which is quite extraordinary,” Beyrer says, adding that he did not expect the U.S. to be at this point this early on in the vaccination process. His earliest predictions pointed to June or July.

“I say all of that really just to make the point, that the administration is making, which is that the donation of AstraZeneca is not at the expense of any American or anybody in America who wants a vaccine,” Beyrer says.

Sharing How to Make More Vaccines

According to Beyrer, next steps should ensure developing countries can make their own supplies of vaccines. To facilitate this, the U.S. would need to share the intellectual rights to and means to manufacture vaccines.

“We need to start thinking about intellectual property transfer and increasing manufacturing in low- and middle-income countries that could potentially manufacture these vaccines,” Beyrer says. “If we could increase global supply through local manufacture, then that would not only help deal with this enormous problem right now, but it could also potentially help us get ahead of these variants.”

Intellectual property transfer and licensing for the manufacture of vaccines can be a lasting solution to the problem.

“We need to build scientific capacity and vaccine capacity, globally, and we can do this," Beyrer says. “These are not easy products to make, but there are multiple countries that are able to do it.” He cites Brazil, Thailand, South Africa, and South Korea as countries with the manufacturing experience to make vaccines.

Beyrer adds that sharing the licensing for the vaccine “is also the kind of thing that helps us globally for the next pandemic. We have to get out of charity mode when we think about responding globally to these pandemics. We have to start thinking more about how we are all in this together.”

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