Coronavirus vaccine success to hinge on global immunisation programme

But the real test may depend on how many people have access to a vaccine. A majority of the world’s 7.8 billion people would likely need to be inoculated to reach the critical mass or “herd immunity” to significantly slow or stop transmission, experts say.

Public health experts say the more people that get the vaccine could be the difference between bringing the pandemic under control and a virus ping-ponging around the world to spark repeated outbreaks. It is a supply and demand challenge as countries jockey to secure supply for their own populations, with hundreds of millions of potential early doses already earmarked for Americans, Europeans, Indians and Chinese.

“They need to reduce vaccine nationalism in order to have a chance to get access to the [global] supply,” Madrid said. AstraZeneca has also given a licence to the Serum Institute of India to manufacture another 1 billion doses for lower and middle income countries. Half of those will go to India, company CEO Adar Poonawalla told television broadcaster India Today last week.

Another Chinese candidate, developed by Clover Biopharmaceuticals but not among those to have reached phase three trials, is being funded as part of CEPI’s portfolio. “[Even] with a full countrywide vaccination campaign, the country could be at significant risk of another outbreak due to spread of the virus from other countries that have not been able to fully vaccinate,” he said.

But those agreements are not happening quickly enough, according to Sai Prasad, president of the Developing Countries Vaccine Manufacturers Network, a consortium of 40 manufacturers from 14 countries and territories. Chinese and Oxford coronavirus vaccine trials produce immune responses“It’s a highly technologically challenging field. So unless there is really a matchmaking that happens between these innovating companies and the large manufacturers [or multinationals] at an early stage, there will be a lot of delays in the future,” he said.

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