Coronavirus pandemic will live on but vaccines work: So! Get Vaccinated!
Stop Saying ‘Post-Pandemic’: For much of the world, it’s far from over: The coronavirus has already killed more people in 2021 than it did in all of 2020.
The coronavirus may be receding in New York and Toronto and Tel Aviv, but for much of the world it is a more fearsome threat than ever: Fueled by the spread of more-contagious variants and abetted by a profoundly unequal vaccination drive — 85 percent of all doses have been administered in high- and upper-middle-income countries — the pandemic has already killed more people in 2021 than it did in all of 2020.
“Trickle-down vaccination is not an effective strategy for fighting a deadly respiratory virus,” the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said last month. “Covid-19 has already cost more than 3.3 million lives and we’re on track for the second year of this pandemic to be far more deadly than the first.”
What will it take to vaccinate the rest of the world more quickly? Here’s what people are saying.
Are patents the problem?
Last month, the Biden administration unexpectedly endorsed the temporary suspension of patent protections for coronavirus vaccines, a move that 57 countries, Tedros and more than 170 former heads of state and Nobel laureates had called for as a necessary step toward ending the pandemic.
But as Damian Garde, Helen Branswell and Matthew Herper wrote for Stat at the time, waiving the patents could prove a symbolic gesture in the short term. Even if the European Union agreed to the measure — and so far, it remains staunchly opposed — experts suggest the earliest the world could expect to see additional capacity would be in 2022.
“We’re not talking about any immediate help for India or Latin America or other countries going through an enormous spread of the virus,” Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown Law, told Stat. “While they’re going to be negotiating the text, the virus will be mutating.”
Why? One view is that patent waivers can’t help get shots into arms unless vaccine makers also share their manufacturing methods: While brand-name drugs can be replicated relatively easily, vaccines like the ones from Pfizer and Moderna are much more difficult to reverse-engineer. “One may transfer the I.P.” — intellectual property — “but the transfer of skills is not that simple,” Norman Baylor, the president of Biologics Consulting, told Stat.
This view is not without its detractors. Some experts have argued that pharmaceutical companies are simply trying to protect their monopoly power by overstating manufacturing challenges and casting developing countries as insufficiently advanced to meet them — “an offensive and a racist notion,” Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Global Health Policy and Politics Initiative at Georgetown University, told The Times.
But some of the hurdles to ramping up production are logistical and universal: There are only so many factories in the world that make vaccines, and before the pandemic they were busy producing between 3.5 billion and 5.5 billion doses annually, or less than half the number needed just for the coronavirus.
What’s more, Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines rely on a novel technology — snippets of the coronavirus’s genetic material encased in lipid nanoparticles — that had never been used in a mass-produced vaccine before last year. Only a small number of companies have the ingredients and specialized equipment to produce those nanoparticles, and retrofitting other facilities to do the same takes months, Rebecca Heilweil reported for Recode in March.
“What we’ve got now is probably fairly close to the maximum that you could get with only 10 months of lead time to round up the supply chain,” Derek Lowe, a drug discovery chemist and science journalist, told her.
The coronavirus may be receding in New York and Toronto and Tel Aviv, but for much of the world it is a more fearsome threat than ever: Fueled by the spread of more-contagious variants and abetted by a profoundly unequal vaccination drive — 85 percent of all doses have been administered in high- and upper-middle-income countries — the pandemic has already killed more people in 2021 than it did in all of 2020.
“Trickle-down vaccination is not an effective strategy for fighting a deadly respiratory virus,” the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said last month. “Covid-19 has already cost more than 3.3 million lives and we’re on track for the second year of this pandemic to be far more deadly than the first.”
What will it take to vaccinate the rest of the world more quickly? Here’s what people are saying.
Are patents the problem?
Last month, the Biden administration unexpectedly endorsed the temporary suspension of patent protections for coronavirus vaccines, a move that 57 countries, Tedros and more than 170 former heads of state and Nobel laureates had called for as a necessary step toward ending the pandemic.
But as Damian Garde, Helen Branswell and Matthew Herper wrote for Stat at the time, waiving the patents could prove a symbolic gesture in the short term. Even if the European Union agreed to the measure — and so far, it remains staunchly opposed — experts suggest the earliest the world could expect to see additional capacity would be in 2022.
“We’re not talking about any immediate help for India or Latin America or other countries going through an enormous spread of the virus,” Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown Law, told Stat. “While they’re going to be negotiating the text, the virus will be mutating.”
Why? One view is that patent waivers can’t help get shots into arms unless vaccine makers also share their manufacturing methods: While brand-name drugs can be replicated relatively easily, vaccines like the ones from Pfizer and Moderna are much more difficult to reverse-engineer. “One may transfer the I.P.” — intellectual property — “but the transfer of skills is not that simple,” Norman Baylor, the president of Biologics Consulting, told Stat.
This view is not without its detractors. Some experts have argued that pharmaceutical companies are simply trying to protect their monopoly power by overstating manufacturing challenges and casting developing countries as insufficiently advanced to meet them — “an offensive and a racist notion,” Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Global Health Policy and Politics Initiative at Georgetown University, told The Times.
But some of the hurdles to ramping up production are logistical and universal: There are only so many factories in the world that make vaccines, and before the pandemic they were busy producing between 3.5 billion and 5.5 billion doses annually, or less than half the number needed just for the coronavirus.
What’s more, Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines rely on a novel technology — snippets of the coronavirus’s genetic material encased in lipid nanoparticles — that had never been used in a mass-produced vaccine before last year. Only a small number of companies have the ingredients and specialized equipment to produce those nanoparticles, and retrofitting other facilities to do the same takes months, Rebecca Heilweil reported for Recode in March.
“What we’ve got now is probably fairly close to the maximum that you could get with only 10 months of lead time to round up the supply chain,” Derek Lowe, a drug discovery chemist and science journalist, told her.
Labels: Spencer Bokat-Lindell, The New York Times, World Health Organization
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