SCIENCE; (DATA) OUR WORLD IN DATA
All told, 14 billion doses could leave factories before the year is over, according to a document written in advance of a March summit about stepping up the production pace. That s a startling number before the pandemic, all of the world s vaccinemakers together produced at most 5.5 billion doses annually and the document stresses that it s the best of all scenarios. “We have a set of manufacturing challenges that make it unlikely that we can meet the 14-billion aspiration,” cautions Lurie, who helped organize the meeting.
Raw materials, such as disposable bags that line bioreactors, filters, and cell-culture media, are the biggest challenge. “Raw material inputs have nowhere near kept up with the anticipated demand,” Lurie says. Importing and exporting delays have exacerbated the shortages, and travel bans have made it difficult to move experts around the world to troubleshoot manufacturing snafus. Almost every vaccine producer has failed
Lessons
In January, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, issued a blunt warning. The world was “on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure,” he said. Wealthy countries were buying up available COVID-19 vaccines, leaving tiny amounts for others a replay of what happened during the 2009 influenza pandemic. “The price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries,” Tedros said.
He was right. Today, some rich countries are vaccinating children as young as 12 years old, who are at extremely low risk of developing severe COVID-19, while poorer countries don’t even have enough shots for health care workers. Nearly 85% of the COVID-19 vaccine doses administered to date have gone to people in high-income and upper middle–income countries. The countries with the lowest gross domestic product per capita only have 0.3%.
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