Dear President Biden,

Since January 2021, COVID-19 has killed at least 1.5 million people worldwide. Current global vaccine supply cannot meet global needs, and people in lower-income countries are unlikely to receive vaccines until 2023 or later. Inequitable vaccine access will not only endanger millions of people abroad, but also threaten U.S. vaccinations domestically—and jeopardize global economic recovery. The IMF calculates that a global investment of $50 billion to vaccinate the world would result in $9 trillion in economic growth by 2025—a return of about 267 percent per year for an investment that makes the world enormously safer.

Bold global leadership is needed to end this pandemic. We urge your administration to:

• Accelerate and intensify negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to share critical COVID-19 vaccine information and technologies with additional manufacturers at home and abroad—or else risk losing their government-granted and taxpayer funded patent monopolies.

• Break the supply chokepoints with substantial investments to scale manufacturing capacity both domestically and globally in regional manufacturing hubs to meet the world’s needs within a year.

These steps will alleviate current vaccine supply constraints by ensuring a robust supply of vaccines as rapidly as possible. In March, Congress appropriated over $16 billion to your administration that can be used for vaccine manufacturing. Most of those funds remain unspent.

We urge you to take immediate decisive action to ensure adequate vaccine supply to solve this global crisis.

Sincerely,