Every country wants a covid-19 vaccine. Who will get it first?

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The Chinese company Sinovac Biotech developed an experimental vaccine for SARS back in 2004. That disease went away after killing just 800 people, and the project was shelved. But it meant that when the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, exploded in China last January, the company had a road map for what to do next. Four months later, it published evidence that it could protect monkeys against the disease using a simple vaccine made from killed virus.

By then, though, China had a different problem: not enough covid-19. Its draconian lockdown measures had quashed the virus at home so effectively that doctors couldn’t find patients to fully test their vaccine on. The US had plenty of infections, but tensions between the countries meant no Chinese vaccine for covid-19 will ever be tested on US soil. 

So in June Sinovac struck a deal with a Brazilian vaccine center, the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, to run a large trial there on about 9,000 health-care workers. For Brazil, battered by covid-19, the study comes with a clear quid pro quo. Butantan will pay for the trial and recruit volunteers; in exchange, Sinovac has promised to supply Brazil with 60 million vaccine doses and to let it manufacture further supplies as well. 

Brazil can do that because, since the 1980s, it has carefully protected its ability to study, manufacture, and bottle vaccines at Butantan and at a second center near Rio de Janeiro. “The national immunization program of Brazil has self-sufficiency as a goal,” says Ricardo Palacios, the Butantan infectious-disease doctor who is running the study. 

People in every country in the world will soon be clamoring for covid-19 vaccines. The US, through a government initiative called Operation Warp Speed, has already spent more than $5 billion to get drug makers to manufacture vaccines on its soil. China has a portfolio of its own candidates and has ramped up investment in biomanufacturing. But other countries, particularly in Europe, over the years have sold off or shuttered government manufacturing centers, let national expertise disappear, lost interest, or come to rely on neighbors to make and bottle vaccines.

An ample supply of a covid vaccine could become a coin of geopolitical power, as oil and nuclear weapons are now. Governments will be counting on it to allow them to reopen economies and assure political stability. Alliances are already shifting, with leverage going to countries that can create vaccines, test them, manufacture bulk ingredients, and perform the “fill and finish” bottling. The rest of the world apprehensively watches, fearful of being left defenseless against the deadly pandemic.  

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The race toward covid vaccines has moved with unprecedented speed. As of July, several candidates, including Sinovac’s, had been shown to protect monkeys and proved safe in initial tests on people; the next phase of clinical trials tests whether they

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By: Katie McLean
Title: Every country wants a covid-19 vaccine. Who will get it first?
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/13/1006314/take-your-best-shot/
Published Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2020 11:00:00 +0000

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