At a global health event hosted by the U.K. think tank Chatham House, WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said three constraints — availability of raw materials, personnel shortages and export restrictions — were hampering efforts to increase production of coronavirus vaccines.
"We have to scale up and scale out COVID-19 vaccine production, particularly in emerging markets and developing countries," she said. "The fact is that each additional day the vaccine shortage continues, people will pay with their lives."
In recent weeks, the vaccine accelerator known as COVAX, a project of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization and the World Health Organization, has begun delivering its first vaccine shipments to developing countries.
COVAX anticipates that 237 million AstraZeneca vaccines will be shipped to 142 countries by the end of May.
Okonjo-Iweala, the former minister of finance for Nigeria and recent board chair of Gavi, observed that while approximately 60 countries are moving forward with plans to vaccinate their populations, 130 are languishing because of inadequate supply.
She said the status quo would exacerbate the pandemic, leading to broader challenges that the world will have to confront together.
One frustration Okonjo-Iweala highlighted was the country-by-country regime for export restrictions that has jeopardized free access to materials for making vaccines. WTO rules allow member countries to consider export restrictions that are "temporarily applied to prevent or relieve critical shortages."
While down from a pandemic peak of 91 WTO member states, 59 still maintain some sort of pandemic-related export control or licensing requirement, Okonjo-Iweala said, noting that such restrictions can hamper vaccine production, which relies on international supply chains.
"Not all of them appear to be temporary," she remarked. "Not all of them are proportionate."
Some member states are proposing that the WTO's intellectual property rules for vaccines and therapeutics intended to treat COVID-19 be waved. In October, India and South Africa wrote to the WTO's Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights requesting it issue a general waiver for aspects of trade law that govern copyrights, patents, industrial designs and trade secrets.
"Many of the proposal's supporters are developing and least developed countries, deeply marked by the memory of unaffordable HIV/AIDS drugs," Okonjo-Iweala observed. "Many, many people died who should not have. More recently, they remember being left at the back of the queue for H1N1 vaccines as richer countries bought up available supplies, which in the end were not used."
--Editing by Adam LoBelia.
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