U.S. Sending 1.5 Million Moderna Vaccine Doses to Sri Lanka

(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. is sending more than 1.5 million doses of Moderna Inc.’s coronavirus vaccine to Sri Lanka on Wednesday, the latest shipment as President Joe Biden begins sharing the American stockpile of shots.

The doses will arrive in Sri Lanka on Friday and are being sent through Covax, the global vaccine procurement initiative intended to secure inoculations for low- and middle-income nations, according to a White House statement.

Biden’s administration has pledged to ship at least 80 million doses -- a mix of Moderna, Pfizer Inc. and Johnson & Johnson vaccines -- out of the country this summer. The U.S. has sent them bit by bit as arrangements and transportation logistics fall into place. He had planned to send 80 million by the end of June, but missed that target.

The administration has separately ordered 500 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine to donate abroad, beginning next month. The president has escalated international assistance on vaccinations as demand within the U.S. fades.

The U.S. has also shipped doses to Laos, Costa Rica and Fiji this week. Last week, the administration announced shipments to Indonesia, Nepal, Bhutan, Moldova, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Guatemala, Vietnam and Malaysia.

Biden began sharing doses abroad after the U.S. took the first hundreds of millions of doses made on its soil. The early domestic focus allowed the U.S. vaccination campaign to surge ahead of peer countries early on, though it has slowed as uptake has waned.

With supply now well exceeding demand, Biden has begun donating doses, some of them directly and some through Covax. The total donation pledge, of 580 million doses, is on top of doses that are being manufactured in the U.S. and shipped directly to other nations.

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