Publications /
Opinion

Back
The World is Facing a Maddening Bottleneck
Authors
October 29, 2020

Even if a COVID-19 vaccine is developed, there is unlikely to be a quick return to normality. Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s leading expert in infectious diseases dared a prediction“We will know whether a vaccine is safe by the end of November, the beginning of December. The question is, once you have a safe and effective vaccine, or more than one, how can you get it to the people who need it as quickly as possible? You’ll have to wait several months into 2021 when you talk about vaccinating a substantial proportion of the population, so that you can have a significant impact on the dynamic of the outbreak. That very likely will not be into the second or third quarter”. Nine candidate vaccines are currently being evaluated for inclusion in the international COVAX Facility, which eventually will organize the global distribution and financing of chosen vaccines. But none of the giants, such as U.S. group Moderna (Phase III), Germany’s CureVac (Phase I), Institut Pasteur/Merck/Themis, an Austrian-American-French consortium (preclinical), or China’s Clover Biopharmaceuticals (Phase I) have confirmed that their vaccine is ready to be distributed around the globe. “Rapid responses by governments, academia and industry”, noted Nature“have already resulted in the production of more than 180 vaccine candidates, 42 of which are being tested in humans at the time of writing”.

Kate Bingham, chairwoman of the UK Vaccine Task Force told BBC Scotland that a COVID vaccine could be given to some of the most vulnerable people “this side of Christmas”, but admitted, reported the BBC, that “it was difficult to put an exact date on when normal life could resume”, but “she was hopeful that by 2022 there would be no need for people to wear face masks and was hopeful people may also go on summer holiday next year”. In June, the Wall Street Journal published some sobering news: “Frantic efforts to bring coronavirus vaccines to the world are facing a maddening bottleneck: the small glass vials that hold the shots”. Twelve to fifteen billion vaccine shots will be needed, experts believe, to cure the world, but glass manufacturers will be unable to provide the urgently needed vials, and that means, according to Business Insider France (June 8) “billions could struggle to access” the vaccine. The COVAX (COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access) Facility, comprising 172 nations coordinated by the World Health Organization, is planning by the end of 2021 to deliver two billion doses to participating countries.

‘Twelve to Fifteen Billion Vaccine Shots are Needed’

The distribution process will be “likely extremely difficult and slow for the first generation of vaccines” and the vaccination progress would take “well into 2021, and potentially 2022 or 2023”. While the coronavirus is indisputably the most pressing health issue in the world, the constant supply of packaging for other key vaccines, including meningitis, influenza, and typhoid, must be maintained—an estimated six billion vials are needed. The vials are shaped from specialized glass supplied by firms including Thermo Fisher Scientific and Schott. “There’s only 200 million vials left in the world now”, said Sir John Bell, Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford, on the BBC Today radio program, “because they’ve all been sucked up by various people who can anticipate a vaccine”. “If we went to China now”, confirms Marc Koska, the inventor of a self-destructing syringe that helped reduce HIV transmissions, “or indeed anywhere in the world, to ask for a billion glass vials to inject everyone in Europe twice, it would be many months or years before we got supply. That has become the weak link in this whole supply chain”.

It is not only the lack of glass that will slow global distribution. Vaccines have to be transported and stored, at times in Arctic temperatures. The German government decided to open 60 storage and distribution centers all over the country. The question is urgent: how do companies and health agencies get vaccines to the people, many without access to electricity and freezers? Anna Nagurney, Professor of Operations Management at the University of Massachusetts, wrote in The Conversation (September 18)“The answer is something called the vaccine cold chain—a supply chain that can keep vaccines in tightly controlled temperatures from the moment they are made to the moment they are admitted to a person”. Ultimately hundreds of millions of people in the United States and billions globally are going to need the coronavirus vaccine—and potentially two doses of it. The mass vaccination effort is going to require a complex vaccine cold chain on a scale never seen before. The current vaccine cold chain is not up to the task and expanding the supply chain is not going to be easy. The cold chain, noted the professor, “requires three major pieces of infrastructure: planes, trucks, and cold storage warehouses … Different vaccines may require different temperatures and different handling procedures”. Nagurney added that, “Most vaccines need to be stored within 1 degree Fahrenheit of their ideal temperature. Traditionally vaccines are usually stored between 35 degrees Fahrenheit and 46 degrees Fahrenheit, but some of the leading COVID 19 vaccines need to be stored at much colder temperatures … mistakes are mostly due to inappropriate shipping procedures in the cold chain, and these losses are estimated at $34.1 billion annually”. She continued: “Several major logistic companies, as UPS and DHL are investing in new storage facilities for cold chain management. UPS is adding freezer farms of 600 freezers capable of reaching minus 80 degrees Celsius near UPS air hubs in Louisville, Kentucky, and the Netherlands. Each freezer will be able to hold 48,000 vials of vaccines”. All of these investments, the ordering of vials or creation of freezer parks, are made before any vaccine has been finalized, meaning pharmaceutical groups and governments risk billions of dollars.

 

The opinions expressed in this article belongs to the author.

RELATED CONTENT

  • Authors
    March 9, 2020
    1- Face au danger : Etat responsable et population disciplinée Les épidémies et les pandémies font partie des risques globaux qu’encourt le monde moderne. Si l’effet de ces fléaux connus depuis longtemps par l’humanité, est aujourd’hui diminué par les progrès scientifiques en matière de santé, le danger n’est pourtant pas écarté du fait des progrès de la communication et des avancées dans les domaines du transport. Avec un monde aux continents plus facilement reliés et des humains ...
  • Authors
    Salma Daoudi
    February 25, 2020
    Epidemics are hardly a novelty. They have been shaping, mapping, and fundamentally altering human history from time immemorial. Exposing national vulnerabilities and feeding off poverty and insecurity, diseases have consistently threatened human and homeland security. Paradoxically, while globalization has helped concentrate global scientific efforts and disseminate ever more rapidly technologies and knowledge production, it has also significantly increased global interconnectednes ...
  • Authors
    February 24, 2020
    The outbreak in China has already affected economic sectors in Latin America. Is there more to come? China’s economy has come to a sudden stop. Large parts of the country remain in shutdown mode after the end of the Lunar New Year holiday, with national passenger traffic declining by 85% on the Wednesday after the break compared to 2019.   Outside of China, the impact of the slowdown has already been felt, with companies like Apple and Land Rover warning of lower production, as pa ...
  • Authors
    May 16, 2018
    He has reserved his page in history. Half a century ago Ernest “Che” Guevara was an icon of a global youth rebellion, a revolutionary pop star for the dreaming romantic generation of  1968- kids of the bourgeois conformist society who never had the courage to risk their lives or time for the oppressed. Instead, the angry restless sympathizers of Cuban and Vietnamese fighters threw stones and molotov cocktails, some smoked pot and shouted their support to Ho Chi Minh, the frail leade ...
  • Authors
    August 31, 2016
    Following the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, we published part 1 of this policy series, presenting a comprehensive analytical and predictive model explaining the key factors leading to failure or success of DRM strategies in Africa. In part 2, we provide concrete illustrations of actionable solutions in order to help policy leaders implement DRM successfully for effective delivery of the SDGs. ...
  • Authors
    Michel Legros
    Farid Chaoui
    October 1, 2013
    Pénuries fréquentes de médicaments, dépenses non remboursées, distances trop longues en milieu rural pour accéder à des services de soins, vétusté et inadaptation de certains équipements, les systèmes de santé des pays du Maghreb central traversent une crise. Si celle-ci n’est pas assez profonde pour constituer un ferment de révolte, elle s’agrège aux autres difficultés qui rendent la vie quotidienne parfois difficilement supportable et génèrent de nombreuses revendications en direc ...