For example, Swiss company Lonza created a plan to produce the Moderna vaccine within two months of receiving the know-how. Vaccine manufacturers have retrofitted dozens of factories-most in less than six months. A year ago, no company in the world had produced mRNA vaccines at scale now hundreds of millions of doses are being made. With cooperative technology transfers, new production capacity, including for mRNA vaccines, could be up in months. This is a direct result of government investment in production capacity, sharing of technology, and use of voluntary and compulsory measures to overcome patent barriers. After millions died without access to medications, today’s cutting-edge HIV drugs frequently come to market with near-simultaneous production by multiple companies in low- and middle-income countries. They are wrong, as the world’s experience developing HIV medicines shows. Some observers have claimed that such an effort would not be possible, take too long, or cost too much.

They should immediately work to allow production of cutting-edge COVID-19 vaccines in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The United States and Europe have far more to gain by sharing these technologies than by hoarding them, from preventing a never-ending cycle of new variants to rebuilding global trade and gaining soft-power influence. Moderna, for example, announced just before approval that its vaccine can now be kept refrigerated, not frozen, for 30 days. Logistical challenges that have dogged the deployment of COVID-19 vaccines, like cold chain storage, can be tackled. The technology might soon bring breakthroughs against HIV, malaria, or influenza and enable rapid COVID-19 vaccine development against new emerging diseases. The kinds of shots Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and others have developed are messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines, which are simpler to make, easier to scale, and faster to adapt in the face of variants than traditional vaccines.

This spending brought remarkable breakthroughs for stopping COVID-19 and for future global health security. Likewise, the German government provided $445 million to develop the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The United States, for example, put $2.48 billion into the new National Institutes of Health (NIH)/Moderna vaccine alongside a huge investment of effort in government scientists who pioneered them.

The United States and Europe have poured massive resources into research and development as well as advance purchase agreements that remove risks for companies to develop vaccines. Vaccine development is largely funded by public money. and European Union leaders want to address both the public health and diplomatic imperatives facing them-while also vaccinating their own populations-they should consider doing the same. As Western firms have demurred, Russia has taken them up on their offers, sharing Sputnik V know-how for production in Brazil, India, Turkey, and South Korea. Governments and companies, especially in middle-income countries, have been asking to do so. Yet in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, there is enormous human and production capacity that could be mobilized to make more vaccines and address the needs of people in low- and middle-income countries. Rather, the real game-changer lies in a very feasible effort to expand the pool of available vaccines.Īt the moment, vaccine production approved in the United States and Europe is needlessly limited to a handful of companies struggling to get enough vaccines out the door to meet demand. But Macron and other leaders will never get either issue right as long as they remain focused on what portion of a relatively small supply of vaccines to share.

As wealthy countries inoculate millions of their citizens against COVID-19 and other countries wait to even begin the rollout, G-7 leaders are increasingly struggling to address geopolitically charged vaccine inequities.įrench President Emmanuel Macron recently noted his fear that countries would turn to China and Russia for vaccines and “the power of the West will … not be a reality.” He later walked back his statement somewhat, clarifying that vaccines are a matter of public health-not power.

Vaccine production usa