Status: 04/14/2022 08:28 a.m
According to the pharmaceutical industry, the supply of corona vaccine doses far exceeds demand. Meanwhile, Pfizer boss Albert Bourla is hoping for a multivariate vaccine by the fall.
According to the international pharmaceutical association IFPMA, there is now a veritable oversupply of corona vaccine doses: “The vaccine supply currently exceeds demand,” said IFPMA Director General Thomas Cueni in Geneva. Since the start of production towards the end of 2020, around 13.7 billion vaccine doses have been produced – but only around eleven billion have been administered.
A total of almost eight billion vaccine doses could be produced this year, said Cueni. And yet not all people who needed it would be vaccinated. According to the representative of the pharmaceutical industry, however, this is not due to the lack of vaccine doses, which prevailed until late summer 2021, but to the vaccination programs in some countries. According to Cueni, these have not started to the full extent. This must be better organized in the event of possible new pandemics.
Multivariant vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech by autumn?
Meanwhile, Pfizer boss Albert Bourla hopes to have a new corona vaccine by autumn that works equally well against all virus variants. “It’s easy to just do something about Omicron,” Bourla said at the IFPMA event.
It is scientifically and technically more demanding to develop an effective vaccine against all previously known variants. Pfizer, together with the Mainz-based company BioNTech, launched the world’s first corona vaccine in December 2020.
Vaccination protection targeted for a year
But what the world “really needs,” according to Bourla, is a vaccine that, like the flu, protects against severe disease and infection for a year. With further booster vaccinations, people would become increasingly tired of vaccinations.
“We’re working on that,” Bourla said. Technically, however, the development of such an effective vaccine is very challenging, which in turn is due to the nature of the virus.
The Corona vaccine doses have been distributed in Germany from the Artland barracks in the Osnabrück district for the past year.
Image: picture alliance/dpa
Why patents are important too
Bourla and the bosses of the pharmaceutical companies Roche-Pharmaceuticals, Bill Anderson, and Eli Lilly, David A. Ricks, also criticized the ongoing demands to suspend patents on Covid-19 vaccines or drugs at the event of the pharmaceutical association IFPMA.
Numerous development organizations are vehemently demanding that the patents for corona vaccines and drugs be revoked in order to improve care for people in poor countries. The bosses of pharmaceutical companies counter that the investments that would have led to the rapid development of vaccines and medicines were only possible through patent protection over the years.