Vaccine diplomacy checks revisionist powers and reasserts US global leadership.

In 2020, the United States won the global race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine. But that historic victory could become a historical footnote if the United States loses the race to deliver its vaccines to the rest of the globe.

Vaccine diplomacy has never been more important. Every nation on earth will be watching to see who will rise to the challenge and reap the rewards of global leadership. The United States now has an opportunity to deploy its scientific and economic preeminence in the service of all humanity. The United States has the ability to shield developing nations not only from the virus, but from the designs of competing powers. Yet, to date, the United States has been slow to seize this opportunity, and international rivals—especially China—are eagerly filling the gap created by its inaction.

Vaccines have been widely available throughout the United States for many months and to vulnerable groups for almost a year. Yet elsewhere in the world, billions of people are still without access to any shots and are desperate for help. Vaccine-rich nations such as the United States have a humanitarian responsibility to help bring everyone else out of the pandemic as well; inoculating the world is a moral duty.

In addition to a humanitarian obligation to deliver vaccines around the world, the United States has sound strategic and competitive reasons to do so.

In the absence of U.S. leadership, desperate nations are turning to Beijing, which is offering inferior vaccines in exchange for foreign-policy concessions. Meanwhile, at the World Trade Organization (WTO), a group of nations is proposing that countries agree to strip vaccine makers of their patents, copyrights, and trade secrets—the intellectual property (IP) underlying the products and processes they invented, including the vaccines themselves and the technology that produces them. Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris administration has endorsed this idea, which would surrender national competitive advantages to rival nations without adding a single dose to the global vaccine arsenal.

The real barriers to vaccinating the developing world are not IP protections. Forcing vaccine makers to give up intellectual property will not lower barriers; it will only create new ones, both for today’s global vaccination project and in future pandemics. Rather, a combination of logistical, regulatory, and infrastructure challenges is slowing global vaccination efforts. Fortunately, these are problems U.S. economic resources and technological innovation can readily solve.

The present challenge provides a perfect opportunity for the United States to reassert its leadership role in international affairs and check its rivals’ cynical opportunism.