The result is a fragmentary global vaccination campaign that is likely to unfold at very different rates. For most people around the world, a vaccine will remain a distant hope for several months, and it could be years before the poorest countries cover their populations. Consequently, governments may need to implement alternatives such as widespread testing and smarter social distancing restrictions to contain the spread of the virus, experts in global public health said.
“When it comes to the global vaccine race, there are still many more questions than answers,” said Syra Madad, senior director of the Health and Hospitals Corporation of New York City. “I don’t think it’s enough to get us out of the pandemic … If the question is, is a vaccine an exit strategy? It’s part of an exit strategy.”
Europe and the United States have struck dozens of different and competing bilateral contracts with drug makers, but initial supplies will be limited, forcing tough decisions to be made for at least the first quarter of next year.
This week, the UK’s authorization of the West’s first vaccine offered hope that other leading Western candidates could soon cross the finish line. But front-line candidates use a new viral RNA technology that is difficult to scale up. Whether the US and the EU can vaccinate the majority of their populations, and how soon, will depend in part on whether other vaccines, using more traditional platforms, are safe and effective.
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Meanwhile, the poorest and least powerful states are largely eliminated, depending on agreements reached in Moscow, Beijing, or by a network of public health institutions backed by the World Health Organization.
Russia and China have signed bilateral agreements in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere to distribute their vaccines, but those injections have yet to be clinically proven.
Chinese companies have yet to present evidence from the trials to convince skeptical regulators that their vaccines work, while Russia licensed their vaccine before the trials were completed, leaving immunologists wary of its safety and efficacy.
Furthermore, neither of them can meet the huge global demand: Russia has struggled to manufacture its Sputnik V vaccine on a large scale. China intends to produce more than 1 billion doses a year and has not said how many it will export.
European and US regulators are expected to make a decision within weeks on whether to follow the UK in authorizing an injection by Pfizer Inc. and Germany’s BioNTech. But that only brings a little relief.
The EU has only reserved a sufficient supply of the Pfizer-BioNTech injection to inoculate a third of the 450 million people in the block at most. The United States has bought early enough to vaccinate 50 million Americans.
It will be many months before those quantities are produced, as Pfizer has struggled to secure the raw materials and new technology it needs to produce even half of the 100 million doses it expected to have ready worldwide by the end of this year. year. The UK, which expected to receive up to 10 million doses this year, now expects to receive about half in that time frame.
The next likely candidate, Moderna Inc., only has 160 million doses ready for the EU and this month it will make 20 million doses of its vaccine available to the US 85-100 million doses are expected to be available. additional for the US during the first quarter of 2021.
Moderna’s vaccine, like Pfizer’s, requires two doses. The vaccine uses mRNA technology similar to Pfizer’s, and the manufacturing process is challenging. It involves injecting tiny strands of viral DNA into a microscopic fat nanoparticle at a stable temperature, without allowing oxygen to seep into materials, on an industrial scale.
That leaves Europe and America dependent on less advanced vaccines that are much easier to produce, but whose future is more cloudy. The most important of these is a two-dose injection of AstraZeneca and Oxford University. The EU has bought 400 million doses and the United States has bought 500 million.
But there are doubts about the effectiveness of the injection, after the company said thousands of its test subjects were accidentally given a lower dose than intended during the trials. Other vaccines, from Sanofi SA, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax Inc., are months away from being approved in the EU and there is no guarantee that they will be effective.
Beyond Europe and America, the world’s poorest countries have the Geneva-based public health institution GAVI, which has raised $ 2 billion in an attempt to vaccinate 20% of the population in some 92 countries in developing. But the WHO-backed GAVI vaccination campaign also relies heavily on the AstraZeneca injection, of which it has reserved 300 million doses.
Even if that vaccine proves effective, they are likely to be in short supply in the near future, GAVI CEO Seth Berkley said.
“When we look at the end game of this pandemic, vaccines are likely to be a crucial part of the puzzle, but they must also act alongside improved tests, widely available treatments, and improved health systems,” he said. it is not good in a pandemic to allow the virus to mutate and continue to spread uncontrollably. “
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Meanwhile, China seeks to fill that void with three main candidates. Tens of thousands of government employees and soldiers in the United Arab Emirates have received a Chinese vaccine and more than a million doses of a vaccine developed by the Chinese biopharmaceutical company Sinovac have reached Brazil. At home, Chinese authorities have inoculated nearly a million Chinese with a COVID-19 vaccine from state drugmaker Sinopharm, which has yet to provide any clinical evidence of the injection’s effectiveness.
Countries like Indonesia and Turkey are beginning to order Chinese vaccines while putting off their use, because China has yet to release efficacy data.
“We need to adhere to scientific and medical standards, with vaccines that pass all three clinical trials,” said Wiku Adisasmito, head of Indonesia’s covid-19 response working group. In total, Turkey has pre-ordered 50 million doses.
Meanwhile, African countries are trying to understand not only what candidate vaccines are available to them, but also the feasibility of administration. Ethiopian Airlines said Wednesday that it is installing the air transport facilities to help Cainiao, Alibaba’s logistics arm, distribute Chinese vaccines in Africa.
“We are talking about a continent where the supply chain for basic drugs is not even developed,” said W. Gyude Moore, senior policy researcher at the Center for Global Development, a non-partisan think tank in Washington, DC He said Africa You probably wouldn’t be able to start using Chinese vaccines until the end of February.
In Russia, large-scale vaccinations against covid-19 are expected to begin in Moscow on Saturday. Some countries – Mexico, India and Egypt – expect to receive tens of millions of doses of that injection, but Russia has struggled to produce even 2 million of the 30 million doses it hoped to manufacture for its own needs by the end of this year. . Attempts to increase production have failed as scientists have struggled with adjusting various technical processes and encountered problems with the equipment.
“We are all focused on the Pfizer vaccine, but we will quickly begin to consider a wide range of different vaccines,” said Virology Professor Deenan Pillay at University College London. “From a public health perspective, this becomes one more thing to reduce deaths, but it is critical that we not become complacent.”
This story has been published from a news agency feed with no changes to the text.
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