Why it matters: China has gotten a head start on vaccine diplomacy, sending millions of doses all over the globe, including to Latin America. Experts say it’s in America’s interests to compete in the race to vaccinate the world, and the calls to start doing so are getting louder.

Driving the news: The Biden administration took a tentative first step last week, offering around 4 million total doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine — which isn’t authorized for use in the U.S. — to Mexico and Canada…

“We’re going to have excess supply,” said Zeke Emanuel, vice provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, who was a member of Biden’s coronavirus task force during the transition.

“It would be unethical, and it would be a diplomatic and strategic mistake, to say we need to build up a buffer of 100 million doses while China and Russia are selling to people and saying, you know, ‘You guys count,'” he tells Axios.