It is also working to intermediate demand and supply and avoid vaccine wastage. Our projects cover financing, health sector capacity, cold chain facilities, community outreach, and monitoring. The World Bank has committed $6 billion-a big chunk of it to Africa-to fund vaccine deployment in more than 60 countries. Finally, market forces alone will not suffice to ensure access and deployment in many low-income countries. Ongoing negotiations at the WTO will provide an important signal on how far countries are willing to go to improve regulatory cooperation to reduce trade bottlenecks and limit the excessive use of export restrictions. But we also need guardrails to ensure that export restrictions are not overused. Ongoing work by the World Bank, WTO, and others aims at identifying major regulatory bottlenecks and assisting governments with reducing them. Smooth-functioning vaccine supply chains are needed to scale up production. The establishment of a clearinghouse-a platform that brings together private and public sectors-would create more partnership opportunities, such as Pfizer-BioNTech’s use of the facilities of Sanofi in France to manufacture vaccines. Intense competition among pharmaceutical and biotech companies has hampered the matching of COVID-19 vaccine creators to firms with spare capacity. Producing more will require continuing government support to help firms to expand capacity. But three types of measures can take a bite out of it. ![]() The problem of vaccine inequity is tough to fix. Another 200 million or so doses are within two months of expiration. So far, about 50 million doses have expired and this number is expected to double by next month. These further delays production and distribution.Īdvanced purchase agreements, export restrictions, and regulatory bottlenecks have also resulted in the tragedy of wasted vaccines. For example, noncommercial samples that vaccine manufacturers send to specialized laboratories abroad for testing and quality control tend to be subject to the same import and export procedures as commercial shipments. Nontariff trade barriers in the form of logistical challenges and regulations are also creating bottlenecks. Trade facilitation is an even bigger problem ![]() ![]() But increasing domestic availability came at the expense of foreign supply, thus exacerbating vaccine inequity. So long as export curbs are nondiscriminatory and time-bound, these measures do not violate World Trade Organization (WTO) rules. Around 50 were export restrictions affecting vaccines and products related to their production and distribution. This has negatively affected vaccine production and distribution.įor example, since the beginning of the pandemic, the number of export curbs on medical products increased-rapidly reaching a peak of 147 in October 2022. But nationalistic trade policies, differences in regulatory frameworks between countries, and complex and slow procedures for moving key inputs across borders have impeded trade. International trade is essential to producing and distributing these vaccines through complex cross-border supply chains. The combination of short-term production constraints and the practice by high-income and some middle-income countries to make advance vaccine purchases results in a smaller piece of the pie being available for developing countries. The sophisticated technological capacity to produce the vaccines and their novel and essential inputs, such as mRNA technology, is currently limited to less than 20 countries. Boosting COVID-19 vaccine production is a clear priority, but it faces hard constraints over the short term. ![]() For instance, of the 4 billion doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine planned for 2021, high-income countries purchased nearly 70 percent of doses. Global production of vaccines reached 12 billion doses at the end of 2021, insufficient to cover a global population of 7.9 billion (considering boosters).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |