US President Joe Biden pledged - during a global summit on the Corona pandemic today, Wednesday - to provide countries in need with an additional 500 million doses of vaccines, in what he described as a "historic" donation, after rich countries were severely criticized for excluding vaccines.

Biden said - at the opening of the summit organized by the White House via video - that "America will be the arsenal of vaccines, as we were the arsenal of democracy in World War II."

With this pledge, the total number of vaccine doses pledged by the United States to donate to 1.1 billion doses.

It is to be distributed to 92 developing countries identified by the international COVAX mechanism and to 55 member countries of the African Union.

The White House said in a statement that "the United States has already shipped 160 million of those doses to 100 countries. For every dose we injected, an American arm ... we are now donating 3 doses globally."

The 500 million doses Biden pledges today will come from Pfizer and diverted to low- and middle-income countries.

ambitious global goal

Also in the context of the American move, Biden called on world leaders to cooperate in order to vaccinate 70 percent of the population of each country by September 2022.

Biden said his country would be an "arsenal of vaccines" (Reuters)

The United States organized this virtual summit - which came on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly - with the participation of United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Director of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and leaders of Britain, Canada, the European Union, Indonesia and South Africa.

Yesterday, Tuesday, Guterres - in his opening speech to the 76th session of the General Assembly - sharply criticized rich countries for their monopoly on vaccines, and said that the world had succeeded in testing science and innovation, but had failed the ethics test while dealing with the Corona (Covid-19) pandemic.

Despite the production of safe and highly effective vaccines in record time, a huge disparity has occurred between countries that have abundant quantities of them and others that have barely started vaccination campaigns.

In Africa, only 3.6% of the eligible population took the vaccine, compared to an average of more than 60% in Western European countries.