Millions of Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine doses will be directed to the border of Thailand and Myanmar in December as part of the Biden administration’s pledge to donate doses to conflict zones, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
The doses will be sent through a vaccine-sharing program overseen by COVAX, the world’s vaccine distributor, that specifically facilitates immunizations for vulnerable individuals experiencing humanitarian emergencies because of conflict or living in areas inaccessible to governments because they are controlled by non-state armed groups.
Many of the Johnson & Johnson doses will go to individuals in refugee camps on the Thailand-Myanmar border. Thousands more people fled to the region earlier this year after a military coup in Myanmar in February.
Millions of Johnson & Johnson doses have been sitting in warehouses since Emergent BioSolutions, a contract manufacturer, accidentally botched 15 million doses of the shot by mixing it with the AstraZeneca drug substance. Over the last several months, the Food and Drug Administration has investigated the batches and cleared them for use.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week announced that the U.S. would offer the Johnson & Johnson doses to the humanitarian buffer. In a meeting with foreign ministers, Blinken urged other countries to ramp up their international vaccine donations to low- and middle-income countries and facilitate the shipment of vaccines to harder-to-reach regions throughout the world.
“We need to ensure that people who cannot be reached by government vaccination campaigns aren’t left out of our efforts,” Blinken said during a Nov. 10 press conference. “They need to be protected, too.”
The details of the Johnson & Johnson shipment are still being finalized. It is unclear how many doses COVAX would send to the border and which organizations would help distribute the shots on the ground. The shipment would mark the second for the humanitarian buffer by COVAX, which this week announced it would ship 1.6 million doses to Iran to help protect Afghan refugees.
“In light of potential security risks to the populations of concern involved and delivery of doses, the buffer currently implements a confidentiality-as-default approach to information sharing on applications and related details,” Gavi, the organization co-leading the COVAX initiative, told POLITICO in a statement. The State Department declined to comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The deal comes after former ambassador to the United Nations Bill Richardson traveled to Myanmar on a private humanitarian mission. Richardson while there met with the nation’s military leaders about the Covid-19 situation and ways to help facilitate aid to the country.
“The main focus of my discussions was to identify specific ways to speed the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines from the COVAX facility to Myanmar and to help mitigate a possible fourth wave of COVID-19,” Richardson said in a statement earlier this month.
Gavi, the organization co-leading the COVAX initiative, helped create the humanitarian buffer in March. It delegated decision-making on which countries would receive vaccines to an interagency group within the United Nations. That team is reviewing donation applications from countries. Gavi told POLITICO in a statement last week that only two applications have been approved so far.
Gavi said the indemnification language pushed by pharmaceutical companies, which puts the burden on governments to pay legal penalties for incidents that derive from vaccination, continues to limit COVAX’s ability to quickly facilitate shipment of vaccine to conflict zones.
“Without all COVAX manufacturers waiving the indemnification requirement for humanitarian agencies for the doses in the humanitarian buffer, COVAX is unable to leverage its whole portfolio to support vulnerable populations in humanitarian settings,” Gavi said in a statement to POLITICO.
As part of the Johnson & Johnson deal for shipment to Thailand, the U.S. helped with the waiving of indemnification requirements.