Sec. 6483. Sense of Congress on the use of the Defense Production Act of 1950 for global vaccine production
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The Congress finds the following: As President Biden has stated, We know America will never be fully safe until the pandemic that is raging globally is under control. No ocean is wide enough, no wall is high enough to keep us safe. . More than 600,000 Americans have already died from COVID–19. Already, more Americans have died from COVID–19 than from World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, and 9/11 combined. The continued replication of SARS-CoV-2 abroad increases the likelihood of a harmful mutation that renders current vaccines ineffective.
A new variant could be more transmissible and cause more severe disease, posing a higher risk to the millions of Americans who have not been vaccinated, like the Delta variant. Approximately 11 billion doses are needed to vaccinate the world’s population, but to date, the US government has donated just 40 million doses. More recent promises by the G7 would only deliver an additional one billion doses by the end of 2022. Sharing manufacturing know-how and expertise is critical to quickly ramping up production.
Expanding the world’s manufacturing capacity is critical because donations and bilateral agreements to increase vaccine doses in low- and middle-income countries cannot quickly meet the global demand. The U.S. Government, as the largest coronavirus research and development funder in the world, is uniquely positioned to push companies to share the knowledge required to end the pandemic. Manufacturers around the world have affirmed that they can help ramp up production if they have access to technology.
According to the World Health Organization, 19 manufacturers from more than a dozen countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have expressed interest in ramping up mRNA vaccine production. The Biden administration has also urged companies to share technology. But vaccine originator corporations have been reluctant to share technology. The Defense Production Act of 1950 provides the President with broad authority to support the nation’s defense. The Defense Production Act of 1950’s definition of national defense includes military or critical infrastructure assistance to any foreign nation .
The Defense Production Act of 1950 empowers the President to directly allocate materials, services, and facilities to promote national defense needs. The Act defines materials to include any technical information or services ancillary to the use of any such materials . The Defense Production Act of 1950 has been used repeatedly to prioritize contracts and orders from U.S. companies to foreign nations. It is the sense of Congress that the President should make full use of the President’s authority under the Defense Production Act of 1950 to scale vaccine production and deployment globally, which will save millions of lives and protect Americans from the risk of emerging viral threats.