President Biden and other world leaders, including António Guterres, the director general of the United Nations, are gathering virtually for a small panel discussion on Wednesday to kick off a global summit, convened by the White House, aimed at forging a global consensus around a plan to fight the coronavirus crisis.
The opening discussion, “Call the World to Account and Vaccinate the World,” will be moderated by Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Mr. Biden’s ambassador to the United Nations. Other prime ministers and presidents will also be in attendance, including South African President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
White House officials have said that Mr. Biden’s message to the group will be that the United States cannot fight the pandemic, or address the global vaccine shortage, on its own. Pfizer BioNTech announced earlier Wednesday that it had reached a deal to sell 500 million additional doses of its coronavirus vaccination to the United States. These will be donated to countries that require them.
The summit is being hosted by Mr. Biden in conjunction with the United Nations General Assembly meeting. It will also be attended by executives from drug companies, philanthropists, and leaders of non-profit organizations. Officials from the administration claim that it is the largest gathering to date of heads of state to address the pandemic.
Global health experts have been pressing Mr. Biden to do more to combat the global vaccine shortage. Less than 10 percent of the population of poor nations — and less than 4 percent of the African population — has been fully vaccinated against Covid-19. Covax is the W.H.O.-backed global vaccine initiative. It is currently behind schedule in providing shots to low- and medium-income countries that most need them.
At a briefing held by Physicians for Human Rights earlier this week, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the chief scientist of the World Health Organization, sounded a note of urgency and issued a plea for nations to work together to distribute vaccines in a coordinated — and equitable — fashion. She also called on countries to share excess vaccines.
“A country by country approach, a nationalistic approach, is not going to get us out of this pandemic,” She spoke out. “And that’s where we are today.”