Geneva (AFP)
How can we quickly produce more vaccines to overcome the shortage that is slowing down the fight against a still virulent pandemic?
The main players meet for two days to try to find concrete answers.
"This is to highlight the gaps we have right now in the supply chains of reagents, raw materials, products that you need to make vaccines," explained the chief scientist of the WHO Soumya Swaminathan at a press conference Friday.
The Covid-19 pandemic, which has been raging for 14 months and has claimed at least 2.57 million lives, has sparked unprecedented demand.
The pharmaceutical industry expects to produce 10 billion doses of anti-Covid vaccines this year, or double the manufacturing capacity of 2019, all vaccines combined.
But to manufacture these doses, you not only need the ingredients in unprecedented quantities, but also the glass for the vials, plastic or even caps, at a time when globalized supply chains are destabilized by the pandemic, explains the Dr. Swaminathan.
The partners of the Covax system (WHO, the Alliance for Gavi vaccines and Cepi, its research branch), the International Federation of the Pharmaceutical Industry (IFPMA) but will meet around the virtual table on Monday and Tuesday. also manufacturers from developing countries, experts and governments.
- Cooperation between rivals -
Under pressure from States and public opinion, the large pharmaceutical groups, competitors in normal times, have increased in recent weeks agreements to manufacture more.
Frenchman Sanofi - which has fallen behind in the development of its own anti-Covid vaccine - will thus help Pfizer-BioNTech but also Johnson & Johnson to provide more doses.
Merck will also produce JnJ vaccines.
The Swiss Novartis comes to the aid of Pfizer and the German Curevac just like Bayer.
Difficult at the moment to estimate the exact impact on production but these agreements "are a very good thing and we would like to see more around the world. We need to explore the filling and finishing capacities in Asia, Africa. , in Latin America and use and use these factories to increase the supply, ”insists the scientific director of the WHO.
Marie-Paule Kieny, Inserm research director, in France agrees.
“There are a lot of generic drug companies that have the capacity and the good practices that could help in this process,” she said.
But the problems of intellectual property and licenses very quickly arise, which allow the pharmaceutical giants which have invested a lot - sometimes with significant help from the States - to earn money.
A proposal from India and South Africa on the temporary lifting of patents submitted to the World Trade Organization seems deadlocked, even as pressure from NGOs and the WHO is mounting.
- 2% to 3% -
These efforts to boost the production of vaccines must in particular make it possible to immunize in the most disadvantaged countries, those who do not have the money to obtain supplies directly from the source.
If the vaccination campaigns began at the end of December in many rich countries, the first doses distributed by the Covax system - set up to try to curb vaccine nationalism - could not be administered until this week.
Around twenty million doses were sent to twenty countries in this way.
Next week?
31 countries will be added to the list with 14.4 million doses.
"This is encouraging progress, but the volume of doses distributed through Covax remains relatively low," noted WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
He also stressed that the delivery volumes planned by Covax by the end of May represent only 2% to 3% of the populations of the recipient countries, "while others are moving rapidly towards the vaccination of their entire population in the next months ".
© 2021 AFP