U.S. Is Under Pressure to Release Vaccine Supplies as India Faces Deadly Surge – By Somini Sengupta (The New York Times) / April 25 2021
Biden administration officials are coming under increasing pressure to lift restrictions on exports of supplies that vaccine makers in India say they need to expand production amid a devastating surge in Covid-19 deaths there.
© Atul Loke for The New York Times A mass crematorium ground in East Delhi, India, on Friday.
Funeral pyres have lit up the night sky in the worst affected cities, and the country has set a new global record of 350,000 new infections a day, which experts say could be a vast undercount.
The State Department spokesman, Ned Price, said in response to questions about the export ban that “the United States first and foremost is engaged in an ambitious and effective and, so far, successful effort to vaccinate the American people.”
The export restrictions fall under the Defense Production Act, which former President Donald J. Trump invoked in the early days of the pandemic and President Biden has used since February to boost vaccine production in the United States.
