‘Vaccine will be available for the entire world in 2024’
What you need to know:
- In an interview with Financial Times, Mr Poonawalla said the commitment to produce the vaccine far exceeded the capacity of manufacturers.
- Politicians have promised vaccines by next month, as concerns rise that large pre-orders from the US and Europe will leave developing countries at the back of the queue.
It will take at least four years to make enough vaccines for the global population, the chief executive of the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer has said.
According to Serum Institute of India CEO Adar Poonawalla, Covid-19 vaccines will only be available in adequate numbers at the end of 2024 at the earliest because pharmaceutical companies were not increasing production capacity quickly enough to vaccinate the global population in less time.
In an interview with Financial Times, Mr Poonawalla said the commitment to produce the vaccine far exceeded the capacity of manufacturers.
“I know the world wants to be optimistic . . . [but] I have not heard of anyone coming even close to that [level] right now,” he said in a video call from London. For this reason, he added: “It is going to take four to five years until everyone gets the vaccine on this planet.”
The firm that is based in Pune, India, has partnered with five international pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca, Codagenix, and Novavax to develop a Covid-19 vaccine and committed to producing more than one billion doses.
Vaccine production
His perspective on vaccine production and distribution is particularly pertinent, given that the Serum Institute is tasked with producing vaccine doses for much of the developing world.
The company is the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer by volume, producing 1.5 billion doses annually for use in more than 170 countries to protect against infectious diseases such as polio, measles and influenza.
Politicians have promised vaccines by next month, as concerns rise that large pre-orders from the US and Europe will leave developing countries at the back of the queue. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi pledged to the General Assembly that his country’s vaccine production capacity would be made available globally.
As of last week, there were nine vaccine candidates in phase three clinical trials, the large-scale trials considered the gold standard for determining safety and efficacy.
Despite World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declaring his organisation’s target of two billion doses by the end of 2021 on Monday last week, Mr Poonawalla insists that it will take until 2024 to vaccinate everyone if the vaccine requires two doses.
Kenya is set to receive doses from 2021, which will vaccinate about 9.4 million people at “the highest priority” according to a plan released by the WHO. Dr Moses Masika, a virologist at the University of Nairobi, believes that India developing a vaccine would be good news not just for Africa, but for the whole world as India has proven ability to produce vaccines on a large scale and at a lower cost.
