As India faces a catastrophic COVID-19 outbreak, five top Democratic senators wrote to Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, seeking global access to vaccines, including technology transfer.
"COVID-19 has infected over 148 million people and killed over three million globally, with hundreds of thousands of new cases and thousands of deaths being reported daily," the five senators wrote in identical letters to the CEOs of Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson on Wednesday.
Senators Elizabeth Warren, Edward J Markey, Tammy Baldwin, Jeffrey A Merkley, and Christopher Murphy said India is a major producer of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine and has exported over 66 million doses globally since January 2021.
But in the midst of the recent surge of COVID-19 cases, India is struggling to vaccinate people fast enough to quell the outbreak, they said.
"Though Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and other companies have developed safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines, the uncontrolled spread of coronavirus poses significant risks to global vaccination efforts: as the virus proliferates, it is evolves - increasing the risk of a variant developing that renders vaccinations ineffective," the senators wrote.