Dysfunctional Covid-19 Vaccine Distribution

Hit by an unprecedented health crisis posed by Covid-19 that crippled normal lives of people in the form of lockdowns, besides infecting millions and claiming lakhs of lives, governments and pharmaceutical giants across the world started working on developing a vaccine for the disease on a war footing. Some experts said when the Covid-19 outbreak started that a vaccine would be available by the end of the year if all goes well, while others opined that it would be possible only by mid-2021, even later, or not be developed at all in a worst case scenario. However, a couple of pharmaceutical companies have fueled optimism that a vaccine could be available for the disease sooner than expected. American firm Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech have announced that they have ended Phase 3 trials of their vaccine candidate -- BNT162b2 -- with 95 per cent efficacy after the final analysis, meeting all efficacy end points. Encouragingly, they said that its efficacy was consistent across age, gender, race and ethnicity demographics and observed efficacy in adults over 65 years of age was over 94%. Pfizer Chairman and CEO stated that “the study results mark an important step in this historic eight-month journey to bring forward a vaccine capable of helping end this devastating pandemic”. This announcement came close on the heels of statement issued by biotechnology company Moderna that the Phase 3 trial of its Covid-19 vaccine candidate -- mRNA-1273 -- had met the statistical criteria pre-specified in the study protocol for efficacy, with a vaccine efficacy of 94.5%. This is a significant development as both candidates have well passed the safety milestone required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA), which is at least 50 per cent efficacy. Review by independent experts could be pending as the companies made the announcements through press releases but there is optimism as far as the results claimed by the firms are concerned.

While the possible availability of a vaccine has brought cheer across the world, rich countries may take it all and leave little to poor countries. Pfizer-BioNTech is expected to produce up to 50 million vaccine doses in 2020 and up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021, while Moderna is expected to ship 20 million doses to the US this year and manufacture 500 million to 1 billion doses globally in 2021. But with countries like the US, UK, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, and EU having struck initial deals for more than 1 billion doses, only a small fraction will be available for other countries. It is also reported that India leads in advance buying of the potential vaccines with 1.6 billion doses but that’s just an average of one dose per citizen, which is clearly not sufficient. The UN human rights experts have criticised countries that are trying to monopolise potential vaccines against the disease, saying that “there is no room for nationalism in fighting this pandemic” and “no one is secure until all of us are secure”, as the world is interconnected and interdependent. What the world seems to have forgotten is that the pandemic can in no way be defeated sans co-ordinated global effort by ensuring equitable access to vaccines. Poor countries should be taken along in this exercise, if not given more privilege, as poverty can compound chances of infections, its spread as well as mortality rate. Prioritisation is imperative to beat this pandemic. In case of India, states and areas like the Northeast that have dismal health infrastructure should not be left behind in Covid vaccination. It will be self-defeating to hoard vaccines and ignore the weak.