Trump to sign Covid order preventing international access until Americans get vaccine

Donald Trump is set to sign a Covid executive order preventing international vaccine assistance until Americans have received the shots, a report says.

This comes just days before the Food and Drug Administration meets on Thursday to discuss Pfizer and BioNTech’s application for emergency authorisation of their coronavirus vaccine - three weeks after they filed for it.

The FDA will meet on 17 December to discuss Moderna’s vaccine.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar says that the average American can expect to be vaccinated by the "second quarter" of 2021.

Administration officials told Fox News that international vaccine assistance sould therefore be likely from “late spring, early summer.”

The outgoing president is expected to sign the executive order on Tuesday when he holds a vaccine summit at the White House, according to Fox News.

“The priority is to make sure we distribute these vaccines to Americans before we start shipping them around the world to get international access,” the official told Fox News.

The executive order will identify "who will be working with the international aspect of this, the framework, guides and tools, for when we have an excess supply to meet those demands."

Another official called the vaccines “critical to ensuring the health and safety of our citizens, viability of the economy and the security of our nation.”

An estimated 15.2 million Americans have contracted the virus and more than 289,000 have died of it during the pandemic.

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