The manufacturers of Covid-19 vaccines are expected to pass the 7.5 billion dose mark by the end of September.
Vaccine manufacturers worldwide are now producing 1.5 billion doses per month and this is expected to continue to grow. By the end of 2021, vaccine production is expected to reach 12 billion. Barring any obstacles, by June 2022 total vaccine production is estimated to reach over 24 billion by which time vaccine supplies will most likely outstrip global demand.
At a press conference held Tuesday evening Manila time, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) said the successful vaccine manufacturing scale up has been achieved due to a steady increase in production, supply chain and voluntary tech transfer agreements with partners across the world.
“By January 2022, there will be sufficient vaccines produced for every adult on every continent,” said Thomas Cueni, IFPMA Director General, who cited data provided by Airfinity.
Airfinity is a science information and analytics company. Its goal is to improve global scientific knowledge sharing. By “listening to science as it unfolds and enriching the earliest data signals from multiple channels,” Airfinity offers a different source of predictive forecasts that enable decision makers to understand the implications of new scientific developments.
Booster shots
According to Airfinity, even if G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK and US) decide to vaccinate teenagers and adults and give booster shots to at-risk populations, there would still be over 1.2 billion doses available for redistribution in 2021 alone.
“This means that each month, for the foreseeable year, over 200 million doses would be, with effective planning, available for low- and lower-middle-income countries,” Cueni said.
Dr. Albert Bourla, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Pfizer and IFPMA Vice President, said Pfizer had been producing 200 million doses of vaccines in general before the pandemic. Initially, he pegged their production at 500 million doses “and then we went to 1.3 billion doses just about the turn of the year and we are very confident right now that we are going to make three billion doses by the end of the year.”
“We were able to achieve this because of a lot of things—sleepless nights and the efforts of thousands of people who are doing everything to ensure that everything works smoothly,” he said, adding that while Pfizer already had the infrastructure to fast-track production, the only bottleneck that it encountered was the unavailability of raw materials.
“In order to secure more and more raw materials, we literally had to create new suppliers and we extended financial and technical support to them. The second thing is that Pfizer has been doing this for the last 172 years now and we were founded for the scale up of chemicals for the manufacture of medicines so we have very significant expertise in doing that,” Dr. Bourla said.
Technology transfer
When asked about the manufacturing capacity of Johnson and Johnson, Dr. Paul Stoffels, Vice Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Scientific Officer, said the company started to scale up manufacturing the vaccine parallel with research and development early last year. Since the vaccine makes use of a disabled adenovirus, this requires special equipment that needed to be installed in all production plants “in record time.”
“Our strategy of focusing on technology transfer brought us to partnering with Aspen Pharmacare in South Africa. Aspen is now in full production and we anticipate that all supplies produced in Aspen from now on will go to COVAX countries and the African union,” he said.
He added that Johnson and Johnson has also started transferring its technology to Biological E Limited (BioE) in India. BioE is into substance production so the active material for the vaccine is currently being validated. Once the partnership is in full force, Dr. Stoffels expects that more than 50 percent of the produced vaccines will be delivered to lower and middle-income countries.
Vaccine equity
In view of the upscale in the manufacturing of Covid-19 vaccines, IFPMA renewed its call to governments to shift their attention to delivering vaccine equity including dose sharing. In May 2021, IFPMA had committed to expend every effort to make additional uncommitted Covid-19 doses available to low- and lower-middle-income countries (LMICs) and to support governments that have significant domestic supplies of vaccines doses to share their doses to LMICs in a responsible and timely way through COVAX or through other mechanisms.
“Thanks to the steady vaccine manufacturing output, projections show that it is possible to vaccinate the whole adult population of the world by June 2022. This, however, requires governments to strategically release doses so that vaccines leave the production lines and reach the people who need them most,” Cueni said.
“Such vaccine deployment requires urgent political leadership and coordinated action to remove delivery and administration bottlenecks in many environments especially as mRNA vaccines might make up 40 percent of the additional doses available,” he added.
As such IFPMA renewed its commitment “to support country readiness, and partner with government on Covid-10 vaccine deployment particularly in LMICs, to ensure that they are ready and able to deploy available doses within their shelf life.”
Strong protection vs Delta
Even in the face of the Delta variant, the current authorized vaccines show “continued strong protection from infection and excellent effectiveness against hospitalization and death.”
Both Drs. Bourla and Stoffles agreed that the current versions of the Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson vaccines were efficacious against the Delta variant and that there was no need to develop newer versions for the time being.
Dr. Bourla, however, revealed that Pfizer is currently developing a version of the Covid-19 vaccine that is tailored to the Delta variant “but my prediction is that we will not need it.”
“I think the data will demonstrate that the current one is highly efficacious. The reason why we are developing a Delta variant specific vaccine is because we do not want to take any chances,” he said. “Everything indicates that we will not be needing it but just in case, we are making one.”
He added that Pfizer had already developed a vaccine for the Beta Covid-19 variant “which we are submitting to the Food and Drug Administration. It is clear that we will not use it and we will shelve that.”
“If there are concerns, we will be building in parallel a new version of the vaccine that is tailor made for the variant. The process will take less than 100 days for us, 95 days from end to end so the idea is that we will always stay ahead of the variant,” Dr. Bourla said.
For his part. Dr. Stoffles said they have tested the Johnson and Johnson vaccine at the moment and “it seems to be holding up very fine.” “There is no need at the moment to be worried,” he said.