The World Health Organization yesterday urged Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers to make good on their commitments as the planet’s poorest countries await their first doses.
WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the Covax facility — the global Covid-19 vaccine procurement and distribution effort ensuring poorer countries can access doses — was now ready to begin.
Around 336 million AstraZeneca-Oxford doses and 1.2 million Pfizer-BioNTech doses — the only two vaccines with WHO approval — are set to start being shipped out later this month through Covax.
Around 145 economies are set to receive enough doses through Covax to immunise 3.3 percent of their collective population by mid-2021.
During his news conference, Tedros noted that countries in Europe — which have been striking their own deals with manufacturers — were aiming to vaccinate 70 percent of their populations in a similar same time frame.
The WHO launched its annual Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan for 2021 on Thursday, saying $1.96 billion was needed to fund another year of battling the pandemic.
The plan’s six objectives are to suppress transmission; reduce exposure; counter misinformation; protect the vulnerable; reduce death and illness; and accelerate equitable access to vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics.
Meanwhile, a laboratory study suggests that the South African variant of the coronavirus may reduce protective antibodies elicited by the Pfizer Inc/BioNTech SE vaccine by two-thirds, and it is not clear if the shot will be effective against the mutation, the companies said on Wednesday.
The study found the vaccine was still able to neutralize the virus and there is not yet evidence from trials in people that the variant reduces vaccine protection, the companies said.
Still, they are making investments and talking to regulators about developing an updated version of their mRNA vaccine or a booster shot, if needed.
Because there is no established benchmark yet to determine what level of antibodies are needed to protect against the virus, it is unclear whether that two-thirds reduction will render the vaccine ineffective against the variant spreading around the world.❐
