High demand for a safe and effective vaccine against the coronavirus is already causing competition between countries and could drive prices higher, the World Health Organization chief official warned Thursday.
“If a successful new vaccine is found, there will be greater demand than there is supply. Excessive demand and competition for supply is already creating vaccine nationalism and risk of prize winning,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus during a press conference of the United Nations Geneva Headquarters. “This is the kind of market failure that can only solve global solidarity, public sector investment and involvement.”
Tedros encourages countries to share funding for the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, a group launched by the WHO, a variety of philanthropic and scientific groups, including to develop, produce and distribute Covid accelerate -19 tests, treatments, and faxes. He said larger investments in the program would support international cooperation and provide a more effective response to the virus, which has infected more than 20.6 million people and killed at least 750,400 people worldwide, according to data compiled by the Johns Hopkins University.
He added that finding new tools to fight the virus, like a vaccine, would be crucial to revamping the world economy and ending the pandemic. Developing faxes is risky and some may fail, he said, adding that spreading the investment in fax development among different countries shares the risk of failure and the reward of success.
“Before we spend another $ 10 trillion on the effects of the next wave, we estimate that the world will have to spend at least $ 100 billion on new tools, especially all the new faxes that are being developed,” he said. “The development of vaccines is long, complex, risky and expensive. The vast majority of vaccines in early development have failed. The world needs multiple vaccine candidates of different types to maximize the chances of finding a winning solution.”
Dr Bruce Aylward, a senior adviser to the WHO’s director general, said there were more than 170 vaccine candidates “under evaluation” and 26 of those had been in clinical trials.
“We need to accelerate the development of vaccines and we need to be able to pay for a massive expansion in our capacity to provide vaccines to anyone who needs them,” said Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO’s Health Situations Program.
The WHO’s comments come just days after Russian officials announced they had approved the world’s first vaccine, even though investigators have not released any data on the candidate’s safety or effectiveness.
U.S. scientists and officials soon rule out doubts about whether the vaccine will be safe and whether it will effectively fight the virus. Vaccine candidates in the US have undergone more in-depth research and will continue to be screened in large phase three trials before licensing by the Food and Drug Administration.
“Having a vaccine and proving that a vaccine is safe and effective are two different things,” White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said in an interview with National Geographic that aired Thursday. “I hope so, but I have not heard any evidence to make me feel that this is the case. I hope the Russians have actually proved conclusively that the vaccine is safe and effective. I seriously doubt that they did.”
The US government has sought to speed up the development and distribution of a fax machine through Operation Warp Speed, giving the US billions of dollars to fax manufacturers, among others. An important component for speeding up the vaccine development process is to invest in production capacity before a vaccine is authorized.
Government services have warned that once a candidate is authorized, no single company will be able to produce enough doses for the US, let alone the entire world. It remains unclear who would receive a potential vaccine first, although the U.S. government has said several times that it will be provided free of charge to Americans.
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