World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called for urgent action to increase the production of Covid-19 vaccines for distribution through the UN global initiative, making the jabs accessible to all countries.
Speaking at the end of a historic week which saw COVAX deliver more than 20 million vaccine doses to 20 countries, the WHO Director-General said on Friday that a further 31 countries will receive 14.4 million doses next week.
Tedros said WHO and its COVAX partners will meet with government and industry representatives next week to identify “bottlenecks” and relevant solutions.
“We currently face several barriers to increasing the speed and volume of production, from export bans to shortages of raw materials, including glass, plastic and stoppers,” he told journalists.
WHO is working on four approaches to the issue, including calling for waiving patent rights for vaccines.
In the short term, the UN health agency is connecting companies that produce vaccines with others that have excess capacity to fill and finish them, citing the partnership between Johnson & Johnson and Merck, announced this week, as an example.
WHO is also advocating bilateral technology transfers, so that companies that own vaccine patents can license them to another company.
Coordinated technology transfer is a third option, whereby universities and manufacturers would licence their vaccines to other companies through a global mechanism coordinated by WHO. This would also facilitate the training of staff at the receiving companies, and coordinate investments in infrastructure.
Tedros said WHO had in fact used this approach during the H5N1 avian influenza pandemic in the mid-2000s.
Independent experts investigating the origins of the virus that causes Covid-19 will issue their final report later this month, the WHO briefing heard.
The findings from the mission to Wuhan –the Chinese city where the outbreak first began more than a year ago — together with a summary report, will be issued during the week of 14 March, said Dr Peter Ben Embarek, the team leader.
“We decided to go for publishing and issuing both reports at the same time…because they follow each other and it makes sense to issue them together at the same time,” he said, responding to a journalist’s question.
The WHO experts travelled in January to Wuhan, where the new coronavirus first emerged at the end of 2019.❐
