“We are fighting a virus that is not standing still,” Stéphane Bancel, the chief executive officer of Moderna Inc., told reporters at a briefing held on Friday by a number of vaccine makers and industry bodies. “If you think about the variants that are emerging, the U.K., Brazil, South Africa and now we are hearing about the double mutant variant in India, there are more appearing everywhere. I’m worried deeply about the next six months.”
Public health experts now see a ramped up vaccination effort as key to quelling outbreaks like the one in India.
But despite being home to the world’s largest vaccine industry, India’s immunization drive has slowed in recent weeks and many states are warning that their supplies have almost dried up.
The shortages have partly been blamed on bottlenecks related to a few key items, with Adar Poonawalla—the chief executive officer of the Serum Institute of India Ltd., the country’s biggest vaccine producer and AstraZeneca’s manufacturing partner—increasingly pointing to the U.S.
Poonawalla has repeatedly called on the U.S. to release shipments of critical raw materials, saying the U.S. invoking the Defence Production Act to curb exports of some ingredients and bolster its own industry is one of the main reasons behind the slowdown in shots.
“It’s the shortage of critical input materials that is becoming a real bottleneck,” Rajinder Suri, chief executive officer of the Developing Countries Vaccine Manufacturers’ Network, said at Friday’s briefing. “If anyone of the components is missing, the entire chain comes to a grinding halt. The problem is that most of these materials are coming from the U.S.”
The items that many vaccine makers have been struggling to get hold of include glass vials, single-use filters and bioreactor bags, according to the majority of 15 suppliers, developers and contract manufacturers surveyed ahead of a Chatham House summit last month. However, the scale of the problem, even within industry groups, has been hard to quantify due to a lack of data.
As the scale of India’s virus emergency rose to global prominence this week, the offers of aid and doses started to come. Besides the U.S.’s commitments, the U.K., France and Germany have also pledged aid and much needed oxygen tanks for India.
Still, a more marked shift in the way developed countries view vaccines will likely be needed. Even if the U.S. did send all of its 60 million AstraZeneca doses to India, it would have a limited impact on a population of its size. There are also other parts of the vast developing world that are yet to see shots, or consistent supplies.
“Many parts of the world still remain deeply at risk,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said in a Bloomberg TV interview last week. “I worry about these headlines continuing for a year or more unless international partners get together and help share some of the vaccines that are there.”
—With assistance from Bibhudatta Pradhan.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.