A World Health Organization (WHO) official says excess demand and competition for Covid-19 treatment causes vaccine nationalism.
“When a successful new vaccine is found, there will be greater demand than there is supply. Excess demand and competition for supply is already creating vaccine nationalism and risk of price gouging,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said from the United Nations agency’s Geneva headquarters.
“This is the kind of market failure that only global solidarity, public sector investment and engagement can solve," he added.
Tedros called on countries to support the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, which is a group introduced by the WHO and composed of philanthropic and scientific groups, among others, to speed up the development, manufacturing and distribution of coronavirus tests, treatments, and vaccines.
He explained that if more investments will go to the program, international collaboration will flourish and a more effective response to the coronavirus will be highly likely. The coronavirus has infected more than 20.6 million people and killed at least 750,400 people worldwide, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Vaccine development
Moreover, Tedros said that discovering new instruments to fight the virus, such as a vaccine, will be important to global economic recovery and addressing the pandemic. He describes vaccine development as risky. He also believes that some may fail.
However, he stressed that spreading the investment in developing vaccines out among different countries shares the risk of failure and the outcome of success.
“Before spending another $10 trillion on the consequences of the next wave, we estimate that the world will need to spend at least $100 billion on new tools, especially any new vaccines that are developed,” he said.
“The development of vaccines is long, complex, risky and expensive. The vast majority of vaccines in early development fail. The world needs multiple vaccine candidates of different types to maximize the chances of finding a winning solution," he noted.
According to Dr. Bruce Aylward, a senior advisor to the WHO’s director-general, there are more than 170 vaccine candidates “under evaluation” and 26 of those have entered clinical trials.
“We need to accelerate the development of vaccines and we need to be able to pay for a massive expansion in our capacity to deliver vaccines to everyone that needs them,” Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies program, said.
Russia's coronavirus vaccine
The WHO’s remarks come days after Russian officials announced they approved the first Covid-19 vaccine in the world, even though there is no data on the safety or efficacy of the candidate published yet.
Scientists and US government officials have expressed concern over the safety and efficacy of Russia's Covid-19 vaccine. Vaccine candidates in the US have been involved in more thorough studies and will undergo large phase three trials before receiving authorization from the Food and Drug Administration.
“Having a vaccine and proving that a vaccine is safe and effective are two different things,” White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci told National Geographic in an interview.
“I hope, but I haven’t heard any evidence to make me feel that’s the case, I hope that the Russians have actually definitively proven that the vaccine is safe and effective. I seriously doubt that they’ve done that.”
