Pharmaceutical companies today do not have the capacity to produce anywhere near the necessary doses of vaccines to stop the Covid-19 pandemic. This is warned by Thomas Cueni, CEO of Ifpma, in a letter on the website of the world employers themselves. In addition, Cueni calculates that between 12,000 and 15,000 million doses are necessary for the world population, for which there are not enough vaccine or packaging factories.
"We have good hopes of finding a Covid-19 vaccine but the challenges should not be underestimated," says the CEO of the world employers. "We must analyze how we can expand manufacturing. As Bill Gates said , if we can only produce 300 million doses in each plant, we will have problems, "he predicts. In fact, Gates is promoting with his resources the construction of factories without the vaccine yet. For this reason, Cueni reflects that even lifting 10 of these new plants could serve only 3,000 million doses, insufficient in his opinion, although he believes that it could guarantee the product to the most vulnerable in the first phase.
“Realistically, for all of us to receive a vaccine, we would need around 12,000 to 15,000 million doses, and today the five or six largest vaccine manufacturers produce less than half of this volume in total in a year” for another type of diseases, he warns. Although the current world population is close to 7,700 million people, some of the pharmaceutical solutions they work on are based on two doses. This industrial shortage underscores the strategic importance for countries of obtaining sufficient supplies of future products. In Spain, for example, there is no factory for vaccines for human use.
Currently, there are 10 vaccines in human trials and 126 in the preclinical research stage, according to the World Health Organization . Among the most advanced are large companies such as AstraZeneca and Janssen, each of which has committed to increasing its production capacity to 1 billion doses if they achieve scientific achievement. In the race there are also other laboratories such as MSD, Pfizer, Sanofi or GSK , and biotecs such as Moderna, which yesterday advanced that in July it will start the last phase of trials with 30,000 volunteers and assured that it will be able to manufacture up to 1,000 million doses in 2021.
Public research centers and pharmaceutical laboratories are making an unprecedented effort to get a vaccine within 18 months when it typically takes up to a decade between research and production.
Cueni also warns that it is not only the scientific problem of finding and manufacturing this immunization product, but it will also be necessary to have billions of glass vials, a problem that he describes as a bottleneck. "One solution might be to have five or ten doses in one vial," instead of in single-dose bottles, he advises. It even points out that countries with low incomes will have storage difficulties because these items must be kept at temperatures of 80 degrees below zero.
It also affects another problem, in knowing how effective the vaccine is if countries manage to stop the pandemic earlier. "Conducting clinical trials and achieving reliable results may become more difficult as countries move to flatten the curve and trial participants may no longer have a certain risk of infection that is necessary to demonstrate that a vaccine is truly effective ”, he believes.
More information
- Moderna will begin the last phase of the Covid-19 vaccine in July: trials with 30,000 people
- The WHO includes two other Spanish vaccines in the global R&D of Covid-19
- Giant Johnson & Johnson speeds up and tests Covid-19 vaccine in July
