America has locked up supplies of covid vaccines that it does not need
AS GLOBAL RECORDED cases of covid-19 reach the highest levels of the pandemic so far, President Joe Biden is pursuing a vaccination policy that might well be branded with a favourite tagline of his predecessor, Donald Trump: America First.
Wealthy European countries are following a similar course, reserving the vaccine they have preordered almost entirely for their own people. But America has made more progress vaccinating its population than any of these nations save Britain, and, experts say, it is on track to have hundreds of millions of excess doses this year.
Mr Biden has said he wants America to return to a leadership role in the world. The fact that he is hesitating to show such leadership on vaccination—and has come under almost no domestic pressure to change course—is partly a result of America’s devastating experience of the pandemic. But that shock has only intensified a shift that was already underway: America is once again turning inward. Mr Trump may be gone from the White House, but the impulse to put America first has if anything become stronger, because now the left is exhibiting it as well as the right. Beset by domestic questions of racial equity; fearful about the future of jobs, education and...