Developing nations' vaccine manufacturers bat for pandemic treaty

It's time to focus on routine immunisation: Mandaviya

Vaccine manufacturers in developing countries are batting for the Global Pandemic Treaty in favour of free flow of goods, services, and knowledge between countries during a pandemic. Speaking at the 23rd Annual General Meeting of the Developing Countries Vaccine Manufacturers’ Network (DCVMN), senior world leaders in the health care space and India’s health minister said it was time to look beyond the Covid-19 vaccines.

DCVMN comprises over 40 innovators and vaccine manufacturers across 15 countries. Adar Poonawalla, CEO, Serum Institute of India, said DCVMN supplied 8 billion doses or about 50-60 per cent of the global supplies in the last 20 months. 

Sai D Prasad, board chair, DCVMN, and executive director of Bharat Biotech International (BBIL), said while 50 per cent of the world’s vaccine supplies were supplied by the DCVMs, they got only a 5 per cent share of the global R&D funding.

He batted for having a pandemic convention or pandemic treaty for free flow of knowledge, goods and services between countries during pandemics to avoid political, financial, trade, and knowledge-based barriers. “Procurement agencies were more favourable to providing purchase commitments to companies in North America, EU, etc,” he said.

Meanwhile, global leaders said large scale production, vaccine inequity were still a reality. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), said vaccine manufacturing is concentrated, and stark inequity to access exists. He added that the WHO welcomes efforts to develop vaccines that would reduce Covid-19 transmission and would also be easier to administer.

Seth Berkley, CEO, Gavi, said the vaccine alliance, too, highlighted that timely access remained a grave challenge and that some of the poorest countries were still struggling to vaccinate even 20 per cent of its population.

India’s Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya and WHO’s chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan stressed on the need to focus on non-Covid-19 vaccination now. Swaminathan said according to WHO-Unicef estimates, about 25 million children from across the world have remained unimmunised in 2020, up from 19 million children in 2019 as the pandemic crippled health systems.

“Already, we see outbreaks of measles, diphtheria and other diseases,” she said. WHO is making a priority list for developing vaccines for endemic diseases, and also a priority list of pathogens that can potentially cause the next epidemics or pandemics. Stressing on the importance of adult vaccination, Swaminathan said having an indigenous HPV vaccine by Serum Institute of India (SII) is a great step towards it.

Mandaviya also said it was time to think about routine immunisation. “We have to get this back on track,” the minister said. India has administered 2 billion Covid-19 vaccines in around 18 months, he said, vaccinating about 70 per cent of its total population.