- By the end of 2021, there will be enough Covid-19 vaccine to cover the global population.
- Up to 70% of adults in wealthy countries are vaccinated, compared with 6% in Africa.
- By mid-2022, enough vaccine doses will be produced, which will exceed global demand.
Industry heavyweights said on Tuesday that enough Covid-19 vaccine doses will be produced by the end of this year to cover the global population.
Thomas Cueni, head of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Associations (IFPMA), said at a 2018 press conference that there is a huge gap in vaccination rates between rich and poor countries, but the threshold of 7.5 billion doses of vaccine will be reached in September. Geneva.
In richer countries, as many as 70% of adults receive two doses of the vaccine, while in Africa, this number is only 6%.
According to scientific data analysis company Airfinity, approximately 1.5 billion doses are produced every month.
It is estimated that by the end of 2021, the global output of coronavirus vaccines will reach 12 billion doses.
Airfinity said this means that even if rich countries want to vaccinate everyone 12 years and older, at least 1.2 billion doses of vaccine will be available for redistribution to poor countries.
“This also means that the government will still curb inventories in the face of shortages, and it is no longer necessary to do so,” Cueni said.
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IFPMA said that by the middle of next year, the production of vaccine doses will reach 24 billion – a figure that is higher than global demand.
Albert Bourla, head of the US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which cooperates with Germany’s BioNTech to produce vaccines, said that the cost of vaccines is not a problem.
He said his company sets prices based on the economic strength of the country in which it is sold.
Paul Stoffels, the scientific director of the American drugmaker Johnson & Johnson, said that it is not the patent cancellation issue requested by some non-governmental organizations.
He said: “At present, everything is to optimize the existing vaccine production capacity of those who know how to produce it.”
“If we need 18 months to upgrade the production scale of the existing factory… different companies will take longer, so it won’t help.
