External affairs minister S. Jaishankar is scheduled to visit the US next week as efforts are on to procure vaccines to meet the huge shortfall in India.

The visit was announced days after US President Joe Biden decided to share 20 million vaccine doses from the country’s stocks with the world in addition to the 60 million AstraZeneca doses it already plans to release into the global pool.

Officially, the external affairs ministry did not put out many details about the visit except that Jaishankar is expected to meet the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, in New York during the five-day visit beginning May 24.

Besides meeting his counterpart Antony Blinken in Washington, Jaishankar is also slated to meet other cabinet members and senior officials of the Biden administration dealing with the bilateral relationship.

Jaishankar will also have two interactions with business forums on economic and Covid-related cooperation between India and the US, the external affairs ministry said in an official statement but did not divulge any more details.

A key concern for India on the vaccination front remains the US restrictions on export of raw materials for vaccine production under the Defence Production Act. Though the Biden administration, under pressure, decided to divert its own order of supplies to the Pune-based Serum Institute for the production of Covidshield vaccine, the DPA remains a cause for concern for India.

The US contention is that the DPA is not the cause for the vaccine shortages as is being made out by some quarters in India. “There’s just more global manufacturing happening everywhere in the world than suppliers can currently support,’’ a US official said.

The DPA’s priority ratings require US companies to prioritise government contracts ahead of other contracts that they have in place for manufacturing in the country. “But what it does not mean is an export ban or a de facto ban or an embargo or any restrictions on sales to any other outside clients or customers anywhere. Companies are able to export however they need,’’ an official had said in a background briefing last month.

As for the vaccines that the US has decided to share with the world in the hope that this will encourage other countries with extra stocks to release their vaccines into the global pool, the administration is yet to decide on the distribution.

Asked for a ballpark figure on how many of the 80 million doses will go to India, the US state department coordinator for global Covid response and health security, Gayle E. Smith, said on Wednesday: “I can’t tell you at this point what the allocation is going to be per country.... We are with respect to India and also India’s neighbours mounting an emergency humanitarian response given the surges that are ongoing there.’’

A Reuters report at the end of April — after the Biden administration announced that it would share 60 million AstraZenaca vaccines under production in the US with the world — had said that India was hoping to get about 35 per cent of this lot but till date the quantum has not been fixed.