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The global COVID-19 vaccination campaign began nine months ago and 58% of the world’s population have yet to receive at least one dose.
The big picture: Shortages of raw materials, complex and expensive manufacturing, and choices by vaccine makers have made it clear that the United States and its drug companies are unlikely to pull poor, unvaccinated parts of the world out of the pandemic – but China could. do it.
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The state of play: The richest countries have more vaccines than the citizens who want them, while the poorest countries face darker deadlines for administering the first doses.
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The United States and other Western countries could immunize teens and provide booster shots for everyone, and still has 1.2 billion excess doses available to send elsewhere this year, according to a report from the company. Airfinity analysis.
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Meanwhile, the global COVAX consortium now plans to receive 25% fewer doses than expected due to production issues with vaccines manufactured by Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and Novavax, as well as restrictions on the export of a major supplier in India.
Vaccines manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech have been shown to be both life-saving and reliably produced, but companies have chosen to sell primarily to high-income countries where they make the most money.
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Moderna plans to manufacture up to 1 billion doses by the end of 2021, but virtually none of the doses will be distributed in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
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Pfizer could deliver up to 3 billion doses by the end of 2021, including 1 billion in low- and middle-income countries, the company told Axios. This means that the Pfizer bite will inoculate at most 500 million people in developing countries.
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Neither company has made executives available for interviews on why they made these decisions.
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Moderna directed Axios to its COVAX press release. Pfizer said in a statement that its goal “has been to provide fair and equitable access to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to everyone, everywhere.”
Reality check: The scale-up of vaccine production was understandably slow at first.
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The creation of mRNA vaccines is complex, with several steps that require materials such as small plastic tubes, lipids and molecules called “plugs” which were in limited supply and had very few suppliers.
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“There just weren’t enough raw materials. No one had gone to the raw material manufacturers and said, ‘You have to increase your production at risk,'” said Drew Weissman, vaccine expert at MRNA at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Raw materials are less of a problem now, Weissman said. The biggest problem is to create more certified manufacturing factories. But it’s expensive, and Moderna and Pfizer have hardly invested any money in facilities outside of Europe or North America where it’s needed most.
Yes, but: “Anything is technically possible” to further expand production, said Zain Rizvi, pharmaceutical expert at Public Citizen who co-authored a report on increasing vaccine supply.
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Rizvi explained how BioNTech bought and reassigned a pharmaceutical plant in Germany last year, retrained staff, and then started producing mRNA vaccines, all within six months.
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It can be done elsewhere. Weissman, for example, helped set up a factory in Thailand for another mRNA vaccine candidate.
Between the lines: The United States has some level of ownership over Moderna’s taxpayer-funded vaccine, but the government has not really helped other countries with it, although some clearly want help.
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“We asked Washington to transfer the technology for vaccine production, but US officials said it was something that should be decided by the private sector,” a South Korean official told the Financial Times.
What to watch: China has stepped up exports of its Sinopharm, Sinovac and CanSino vaccines, which can be stored at normal refrigerator temperatures, leading some to believe that China will be the global savior.
The bottom line: “If we want to get out of the pandemic, we need everyone [vaccine] options, ”said Susan Carpenter, immunology expert at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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