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The word in the title is not an exaggeration at all:
Today, there has been a veritable war for coronavirus vaccines between states and federations of states, in which pharmaceutical companies have also voluntarily or involuntarily become involved.
Initially, ethical gestures prevailed more: the British-Swedish AstraZeneca promised to supply vaccines at cost price, and the richest man in Mexico, Carlos Slim, through his foundation, ordered millions of doses of vaccines to the most countries. poor of Latin America. AstraZeneca joined the initiative as a partner, also taking the vaccine as a generous gesture at cost. From the beginning, Samsung has been participating in the program, which helps the computer business succeed, and has even started developing electronic vaccination documentation in the region. Electronic Vaccination Record called. The peculiar irony of fate is that the initiator himself, Carlos Slim, who became a billionaire in the telecommunications business, America Movil The owner was just hospitalized yesterday for a serious Covid-19 illness.
This was followed by the Covax program, under which the poorest countries, organized by the WHO, can also access the vaccine. Ideally, this would deliver over a billion vaccines to residents of 92 countries, involving AstraZeneca (with 170 million doses), owned by Johnson & Johnson in the US, the owner of the actual developer, Janssen in Belgium, whose vaccine has not yet been approved, but 500 million doses) and, curiously, India from the developing world, which, through the Serum Institute of India, also wants to contribute 200 million doses of vaccine to the success of the project, by same as GSK in the UK and Sanofi in France, although their vaccine development has also been delayed.
A novelty may be the advance of Chinese manufacturers, who until now seemed satisfied with supplying their own huge domestic markets, but have now openly turned to conquer international markets. This may even be good news, as there is never enough vaccine, and this is not just one coronavirus vaccine, but virtually all of them.
Several times there have been vaccine shortages in Hungary as foreign multinational companies cannot always produce enough vaccines for everyone, so Hungary has taken steps to boost domestic vaccine production.
Therefore, the emergence of reliable manufacturers who can produce a legitimate product would be welcome.
Well, within the ranks of the vaccine profession, a Chinese manufacturer, Sinovac, is not an unknown player at all. His scientific and technical training was introduced to the profession during the avian influenza epidemic in 2006 and the swine influenza epidemic in 2009-10. Immunogenic and well-tolerated vaccines against both diseases were among the first to be developed and validated by legitimate independent reviewers, and their studies have been published in the world’s most recognized medical journals, the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. edition such as the swine flu vaccine report. His vaccination against the coronavirus has also been read in the most prestigious forums in the industry, including one of the most respected interdisciplinary journals, Science.
Therefore, there is no real reason to doubt the Sinovac vaccine, even though the Western world is currently averse to Chinese vaccines in general.
Perhaps our counterpart to this, our neighbor to the south, Serbia, where the population lined up in crowded ranks for the Chinese vaccine.
Logistical problems
So far, good news. Less good news includes that there are many problems with the delivery of existing approved vaccines and that the development of many vaccines is unexpectedly delayed. There seems to be a country that is willing to pay multiples of the market price for effective vaccines, even in other regions the pre-ordered dose is late, perhaps precisely because of the above. Vaccines are failing within the European Union, and some smaller countries, such as Serbia, Israel or Bahrain, have found a successful separate path, so it is not certain that the principle of force in unity will prevail here.
In addition to the above, there are problems with billing to producers, the union in the producers’ plants is being investigated and the prohibition of exports has also been discussed.
But how are we now
Of course, no one knows where all this will lead, but the current situation is ultimately encouraging. Bloomberg has created a special team of experts on this topic, which monitors the number of vaccines administered daily, broken down at the country level and in some cases even provinces.
To date, between 86 and 400,000 vaccines have been administered worldwide, an increase of approximately 4 million daily doses.
Within the United States alone, 27 million 300,000 doses were administered, an additional 1.26 million each day at the current rate. 6.8 percent of the population was vaccinated. In AmericaAnd 1.4 percent received the second dose. The EU has about 11 million injections, representing 2.1 (first dose) and 0.3 (both doses) percentages of the total population. However, there are also significant differences within the member states of the US and the EU. The proportion of the population vaccinated remains very Israel is the best With 4,347,000 vaccines applied, which means that 31.5% of citizens have already received the first dose and 16.5% have already received both doses. Also interesting is the prominent presence of the Seychelles, which so far have vaccinated 26.7 percent of the population, but that means only 25,800 vaccines in their case, for being a tiny country. In any case, with such figures, the chances of returning to normal life may already be realistic.
The author is an allergist and clinical immunologist.
(Cover image: AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine. Photo: Geoff Caddick / AFP)
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