Covid-19: the pharmaceutical industry ensures that vaccine production will soon be more than sufficient
Doses of the Pfizer vaccine at the Liège hospital in Belgium in January 2021 (illustrative image).
© AP - Francisco Seco
Text by: RFI Follow
2 min
On Tuesday, September 7, global players in the pharmaceutical sector assured that the production of vaccines against Covid-19 will soon be more than sufficient to ensure vaccination for all.
However, the inequality between rich and poor countries remains glaring.
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In September 2020, the threshold of 7.5 billion doses of vaccines produced will be crossed, underlined Thomas Cueni, director of the International Federation of the Pharmaceutical Industry (IFPMA), during a press conference, this Tuesday.
Now, according to science-based analytics firm Airfinity, 1.5 billion doses are made every month.
For comparison, global vaccine production before the pandemic was 3 to 5 billion doses.
Twelve billion doses
By the end of 2021, global production of Covid-19 vaccines is expected to reach 12 billion doses. And even if Western countries set up booster campaigns and vaccination for those over the age of twelve, at least 1.2 billion doses will remain available for redistribution, according to Airfinity. "
This means that governments which always keep stocks of doses in the event of a shortage no longer need to do so,
" Cueni said.
While large-scale vaccination campaigns are taking place in Western countries, where sometimes more than 70% of the population has received two doses, only 6% of adult Africans have been fully immunized against Covid-19. Under these conditions, the players in the sector say they are calling for partnerships with governments to help deploy vaccination campaigns. In all, by mid-2022, total vaccine production is expected to reach 24 billion doses, according to IFPMA, which estimates that production could exceed global demand.
"
Then we will have the same problem as in high-income countries, with people who refuse to be vaccinated
", anticipated at the press conference Albert Bourla, the CEO of the American laboratory Pfizer, which expects 3 billion doses produced this year.
For the leader, the problems of vaccine availability were first caused by the lack of raw materials.
“
The cost is not the problem,
” he says, indicating that Pfizer has implemented a system of different prices depending on the income of the countries.
The lifting of unnecessary patents
As for the issue of the lifting of patents on vaccines, demanded by a number of NGOs, it would not solve anything, again judge the manufacturers.
“
For now, the question is to optimize the existing capacities of vaccine production by the people who know how to produce them.
If it takes us 18 months to increase our capacity in existing factories
(...),
it will take much longer for other companies.
It doesn't help
, ”said Paul Stoffels, Scientific Director of Johnson & Johnson.
(
with AFP
)
►
To read also: The AstraZeneca laboratory doubles its profits in the 1st quarter of 2021
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