This is just a drop in the ocean compared to the lives saved, COVID restrictions averted and trillions of dollars of economic productivity gained from achieving vaccine equity. The production facility for the Moderna-NIH vaccine in New Hampshire, for example, was set up in just 4 months, suggesting we could do the same for other facilities if desired.Īt the current production cost of the Moderna-NIH vaccine, it would cost $12 billion to produce 15 billion doses of vaccine, without even accounting for savings from economies of scale. has the capability to expand its vaccine manufacturing – quickly and at a reasonable cost. While this may sound like a tall order, the U.S. A January report by a group of public health advocates and scientists estimated that in order to ensure every person has access to mRNA vaccines – the type of vaccine that currently appears to be most effective – the world needs to produce 15 billion more doses than the 7 billion doses currently planned for 2022. While President Biden announced plans to produce 1 billion doses per year to give to poor nations, this is not nearly enough. Insufficient vaccine supply and hoarding by rich countries has plagued the global effort to get shots into arms in low-income countries, where supply remains a major constraint. Here are five steps that world leaders must take to make this happen.įirst, we need to make more vaccines. So how do we get vaccines to everyone? The good news is that we already have the resources, knowledge and systems to make and distribute vaccines around the globe. In fact, just 10.1% of the people on the African continent are vaccinated, according to the World Health Organization. Although more than 60% of the world's population has received at least one dose of vaccine, most who are protected live in rich countries. Yet governments – especially those in high-income nations – continue to hoard vaccines, leaving many individuals elsewhere vulnerable to the virus. Once those at highest risk everywhere are protected from severe disease - and if no other vaccine-evasive variant emerges - COVID will hopefully join the ranks of the other cold and flu viruses with which we live. While it's likely that COVID will stay with us in one form or another, vaccines remain our biggest hope for protection of the vulnerable against hospitalization and death, especially for individuals at increased risk of severe COVID-19 due to conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity, or simply their age. When a new variant like omicron pops up, the world reacts by enforcing questionable travel bans and lockdowns and expediting third or even fourth doses of the vaccine. Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels like we are stuck in an endless cycle.
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