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Vaccination campaigns have already started in Great Britain and the United States.
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is conducting a COVID-19 vaccine trial together with BioNTech. Image: Supplied.
GENEVA – The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday it is in talks with Pfizer and Moderna about the possibility of including their high-tech coronavirus vaccines among the first hits for poor countries at affordable prices.
The WHO-backed Covax facility, created to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines around the world as they become available, aims to provide about two billion doses by the end of next year.
It has already sourced hundreds of millions of candidate vaccine doses developed by AstraZeneca, Novavax, and Sanofi-GSK.
WHO senior adviser Bruce Aylward said the organization was looking at a variety of other coups, as well as current leaders.
He said the WHO was “in talks” with Pfizer and Moderna about whether their products could be part of the “early launch of vaccines.”
But, he emphasized, “we also need to make sure they are priced right for the populations we are trying to serve and the countries we are trying to help.”
The American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, together with the German BioNTech, created the first coronavirus prick to receive regulatory approval in several Western countries. Vaccination campaigns have already started in Great Britain and the United States.
The Moderna vaccine is also expected to receive approvals quickly.
LIGHT, BUT A LONG TUNNEL
Both vaccines use state-of-the-art technology and have been shown to be highly effective in phase III trials and are expected to be expensive.
But Aylward praised Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla’s public comments in which he spoke of lowering prices for low-income countries.
“He has said that we are committed to making sure our products have global use and we recognize that it requires pricing it at the correct level in order to make it work,” Aylward said.
“So there is a strong commitment from Pfizer to be able to do that.”
Covax wanted to have a diverse portfolio of vaccines to offer and would evaluate “any product with proven efficacy, safety and quality,” he added.
Vaccines developed by China and Russia could also be evaluated for inclusion “if they meet standards for efficacy and safety,” he said.
A year after the pandemic, which has claimed more than 1.6 million lives worldwide, Aylward praised the positive news about the vaccine over the past month.
“There is light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. But even though there was “a bright light at the end, getting brighter and brighter, it’s a long tunnel.”
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