Maria Magdalena Arrellaga for The New York TimesĪ range of factors has restricted access to vaccines in developing countries, including supply chain and shipping bottlenecks, and politics: the Serum Institute was supposed to supply Covax, but India’s government banned exports at the height of that country’s second wave. Companies in Africa, South America and parts of Asia already have much of what they would need to make them, they say the technology specific to the mRNA production process can be delivered as a ready-to-use modular kit.Ī laboratory at Bio-Manguinhos in Rio de Janeiro. Just 4 percent of people in low-income countries are fully vaccinated.Įxperts in both the development and production of vaccines say the mRNA vaccines involve fewer steps, fewer ingredients and less physical capacity than traditional vaccines. Wealthier countries have locked up supply. The vaccine needs of poorer countries were supposed to be met through Covax, a multinational body meant to facilitate global vaccine distribution - but donations have been slow and limited. Setting up mRNA manufacturing operations in other countries should start immediately, said Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, adding: “They are our insurance policy against variants and production failure” and “absolutely can be produced in a variety of settings.”
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“You cannot go hire people who know how to make mRNA: Those people don’t exist,” the chief executive of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, told analysts.īut public health experts in both rich and poor countries argue that expanding production to the regions most in need is not only possible, it is essential for safeguarding the world against dangerous variants of the virus and ending the pandemic. They say that the process is too complex, that it would be too time- and labor- intensive to establish facilities that could do it, and that they cannot spare the staff because of the urgent need to maximize production at their own network of facilities.
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Karan Deep Singh/The New York Timesĭespite mounting pressure, the chief executives of Moderna and Pfizer have declined to license their mRNA technology in developing countries, arguing it makes no sense to do so. Workers inspecting and packing vials of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covishield vaccine at a Serum Institute of India site in Pune, India.
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