More than enough vaccines being produced, but rich countries are buying them all

New data on Covid-19 manufacturing and supply capacity worldwide indicate up to 12 billion doses from 13 different vaccines could be available by the end of the year.

The doses will be enough to vaccinate 70% of the world if distributed equitably.

However, an assessment from the Duke Global Health Innovation Center Launch and Scale Speedometer shows a gap between wealthy countries and low- and middle-income countries in terms of who controls the lion’s share of vaccines.

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“There are new developments that could push overall supplies for 2021 to 12 billion doses and, if distributed equally, that would be more than enough to vaccinate 70% of the world’s population – the threshold for herd immunity,” said Andrea Taylor, who leads research on Covid-19 vaccines for the Launch and Scale Speedometer programme.

According to Krishna Udayakumar, director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, wealthy countries have now purchased about 4.6 billion doses – with 1.2 billion of those controlled by the US alone for its 330 million citizens – compared to 1 billion for the Covax pact supplying several billion people in low- and middle-income countries.

Apart from vaccine nationalism, manufacturing and supply issues remain critical barriers to acquiring vaccines.

“There is very little transparency in the landscape, so it is difficult for country leaders to assess the feasibility of delivery schedules or to understand the risks and contingencies,” Udayakumar said.

Analysis shows that the African Union and Africa CDC have procured 670 million doses for African countries, in addition to what they will receive from Covax.

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However, uncertainties about financing and production capacity make it hard to predict whether those doses will arrive in the second half of 2021 or sometime in 2022.

The vaccine equity issue also gives an opportunity to new variants that have at least a limited capacity to evade immune responses to render certain vaccines clearly superior to others.

The analysis shows that the vast majority of vaccine doses from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna appear to be headed to wealthy countries. By comparison, of the 670 million doses procured by the African Union, 500 million are for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.

“If current or new variants become dominant around the world and it turns out that specific vaccines have higher or lower efficacy against them, then there will be even more serious vaccine equity concerns. We need to ensure that the right vaccines get to the right places and populations,” Taylor said.

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In South Africa acting Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni on Thursday said phase one of the country’s vaccination programme under the Sisonke Study would come to an end on 17 May 2021.

South Africa has been vaccinating healthcare workers in the public and private sector using the single-dose Johnson & Johnson (J&J) inoculation since mid-February. So far, 207,808 vaccines have been administrated at 72 sites across the country.

Ntshavheni said South Africa was on track to vaccinate more than 1.5 million registered health workers against the coronavirus by the end of the first phase.

“To date, as we sit we are confident from the work and the briefings of the Department of Health and the Interministerial Committee on Covid-19 vaccines that we are on course to meet the target of over 1.5 million vaccinations by the end of phase one 17 May,” she said.

Compiled by Vhahangwele Nemakonde. Additional reporting by Thapelo Lekabe 

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