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The day science has found a Covid-19 vaccine will be a great day for humanity, but we still cannot say that we are out of the nightmare. “We will have to vaccinate a large percentage of the world population in the shortest possible time. It will probably take two or three years, “estimates Richard Hatchett, president of Cepi, an organization created by pharmaceutical companies, state institutions and philanthropic organizations to join forces in creating new vaccines against infectious diseases.
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Finding the decisive weapon to win the war is not enough, so you have to build it, and it is a job that can be time consuming. And meanwhile? There is a risk of being in a distressing scenario, in which trade wars could be unleashed between the States, and within each individual nation, strong social and political tensions, because deciding who will administer the vaccine first would not be easy.
First of all, it will be a matter of seeing in which country the objective will be reached. The government of that country may have a strong temptation to block the sale of the drug abroad, at least until it has reached the coverage of the entire national population. It is very likely that the States adopt protectionist measures and that accumulation phenomena will emerge in the international markets, as we have already seen in these months of epidemic with masks, tampon reagents, intensive care ventilators, for which competition has even emerged within individual countries (in Italy it is the presidents of the Regions who fight for breathing apparatus).
“Any country with industrial capacity to produce the vaccine could impose limits on exports or nationalize production. It is a worrying hypothesis,” says Hatchett, because trying to defeat a global epidemic with only the national interest in mind is obviously a strategy doomed to failure. . Right now there are around 50 different types of vaccines in the world, in almost all advanced countries there are researchers working to find a solution, the strongest laboratories and the largest investments are obviously those of the United States, but also China. He is very busy on the run and it is estimated that at least 1,000 Chinese scientists are assigned to this mission.
Then there is another kind of competition that we can expect: “The selection would take place through a price increase, and it will be brutal,” predicts Simon Evenett, an economist at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, a market expert international. “Whoever has the greatest financial resources will guarantee vaccines and therapies. And the poorest countries will be isolated. “But conflicts will not be only between states. Within each country, at least in the first phase, the delicate question of choosing which categories to give priority will arise: the elderly first, because they are the most exposed and risk most of life. Or young people first, why do we need them to go back to work? And should we start with men, who according to statistics die much more than women from the coronavirus? Then there is the possibility of that, even in countries with a strong public health system like Italy, a parallel private market is created, and whoever can afford it will be vaccinated on their own. There could be scams, hoarding by individuals, legal disputes and even consequences policies.
To avoid this, many ask for the path of international collaboration. One of the first to expect governments and the pharmaceutical industries to agree from now on to coordinate research efforts and avoid future conflicts was Microsoft inventor Bill Gates, who for several years has drawn attention to the need to equip yourself at scale global against the threat of viruses. Gates calls for a large preventive investment plan backed by public institutions. For the entrepreneur, an enormous mass of resources must be established, even knowing that a large part of this money will inevitably be wasted. “We must immediately start building the plants for the production of these vaccines. The candidates to become the most effective product are different and they all need different machines and tools to make them. This means that we have to build different plants for each of them, knowing that many of these structures will not be used in the end. It is a financial risk that private groups cannot take, but governments can. “If this is done, it will dramatically shorten the time to have those six, seven billion doses, at least, that humanity needs to eliminate the virus from calculating that, according to the most optimistic forecasts, it will take at least a year before production begins (but more realistically, the minimum time is one and a half years), and from that moment it will be necessary to wait at least a couple more years to make the vaccines is necessary to protect all or almost all the inhabitants of the planet, and the only way to reduce this expectation to a minimum is to bet a very large amount today and be willing to lose it too. The estimate is $ 30 billion, yet an affordable sum, provided it is divided equally among all the states in the world. Last update: 20:41
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