Helping overcome COVID-19 vaccine shortage could rebuild U.S. standing: FT

vaccine

LONDON, Dec. 5 (Xinhua) -- The United States could rebrand itself by helping overcome the global COVID-19 vaccine shortage, the Financial Times said recently in an opinion article.

"The U.S. could show itself capable of giving the world's poor what they need, as opposed to lecturing from a distance," it said.

According to the World Bank's Multilateral Data Dashboard, though the U.S. has promised 1 billion doses of vaccines to the world's poorer countries, "just 111 million have been shipped, which is enough to give 5 percent of Africa one dose," the article said.

"By contrast, the U.S. has secured two and a half times what it will need for its own people, which will leave more than 1 billion surplus shots," it noted.

This week, U.S. President Joe Biden will host a so-called "democracy summit." "In practice, needles in people's arms would do more than a thousand such summits to get the world's attention," the article said.