Biden Uses Trump’s ‘America First’ Vaccine Plan to Corner Market
- Wartime powers, contracts limit vaccine makers’ exports
- U.S. government claimed first hundreds of millions of doses
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The U.S. has injected more than a quarter of the world’s coronavirus vaccine doses so far, thanks to two presidents who share little except a strategy to corner domestic production of shots, employing a 70-year-old law that’s so far prevented exports.
From the moment the FDA authorized the first vaccines by Pfizer Inc. and Moderna Inc., the U.S. government, first under Donald Trump and then under President Joe Biden, had already arranged to buy all of the companies’ known U.S. production for months to come, assuring hundreds of millions of doses for American arms.