Xi says China ready to boost global Covid-19 vaccine cooperation and travel

‘President Xi Jinping said on Saturday (Nov 21) that China is ready to step up global Covid-19 vaccine cooperation, and called for better international coordination on policies to facilitate movement of people.

‘Pharmaceutical companies and research centres around the world are working on potential Covid-19 vaccines, with large global trials of several of the candidates involving tens of thousands of participants underway. China has five home-grown candidates undergoing Phase III trials. With that [global movement] in mind, Mr Xi said China would propose the creation of a mechanism by which travellers' coronavirus test results were recognised internationally through digital health codes.’

Read here (Straits Times, Nov 20, 2020)

The end of the pandemic is now in sight

‘Both vaccines, from Moderna and from Pfizer’s collaboration with the smaller German company BioNTech, package slightly modified spike-protein mRNA inside a tiny protective bubble of fat. Human cells take up this bubble and simply follow the directions to make spike protein. The cells then display these spike proteins, presenting them as strange baubles to the immune system. Recognizing these viral proteins as foreign, the immune system begins building an arsenal to prepare for the moment a virus bearing this spike protein appears... This overall process mimics the steps of infection better than some traditional vaccines, which suggests that mRNA vaccines may provoke a better immune response for certain diseases...

‘All of this is how mRNA vaccines should work in theory. But no one on Earth, until last week, knew whether mRNA vaccines actually do work in humans for COVID-19. Although scientists had prototyped other mRNA vaccines before the pandemic, the technology was still new. None had been put through the paces of a large clinical trial. And the human immune system is notoriously complicated and unpredictable. Immunology is, as my colleague Ed Yong has written, where intuition goes to die. Vaccines can even make diseases more severe, rather than less. The data from these large clinical trials from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are the first, real-world proof that mRNA vaccines protect against disease as expected. The hope, in the many years when mRNA vaccine research flew under the radar, was that the technology would deliver results quickly in a pandemic. And now it has.’

Read here (The Atlantic, Nov 19, 2020)

Vaccine rollout could cause US dollar to fall 20% in 2021: Citi

‘The widespread distribution of vaccines to combat the coronavirus pandemic and ongoing monetary easing could cause the U.S. dollar to weaken as much as 20% next year, Citibank said on Monday. “When viable, widely distributed vaccines hit the market, we believe that this will catalyze the next leg lower in the structural USD downtrend we expect,” the U.S. bank said in a research note.’

Read here (Reuters, Nov 17, 2020)

How Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine could be cold comfort for some Asian nations

‘With tropical heat, remote island communities and a dearth of ultra-cold freezers, many Asian countries aren't betting on Pfizer's experimental vaccine solving their COVID-19 crisis any time soon. The world cheered on Monday (Nov 9) when Pfizer announced its shot, jointly developed with BioNTech SE, was more than 90 per cent effective based on initial trial results. Yet health experts cautioned that the vaccine, should it be approved, was no silver bullet - not least because the genetic material it's made from needs to be stored at temperatures of minus 70 degrees Celsius or below.’

Read here (Channel News Asia, Nov 10, 2020) 

Independent UN experts decry Covid vaccine hoarding: ‘No one is secure until all of us are secure’

‘The only way to fight the COVID-19 crisis is to make affordable vaccines available to everyone, independent UN human rights experts said on Monday, underscoring that in an interconnected and interdependent world, “no one is secure until all of us are secure”...  “This pandemic, with its global scale and enormous human cost, with no clear end in sight, requires a concerted, human-rights based and courageous response from all States”, four UN experts together with members of a human rights working group said in a statement on universal access to vaccines.’

Read here (UN News, Nov 9, 2020)

Covid-19: A global survey shows worrying signs of vaccine hesitancy

‘We [a group of prominent scientists] recently surveyed 13,426 people in 19 countries. We included two of Africa’s most populous and visible nations, Nigeria and South Africa, which are among the most affected by COVID-19 on the continent. Overall, we found that 71.5% of participants said they would take a “proven safe and effective vaccine” while 14% would refuse it outright. An additional 14% said they would hesitate to take the vaccine.

‘But that average figure is deceptive. It was raised by favourable responses from two Asian countries that also recorded very high trust in government health recommendations. More than 80% of Chinese respondents and 75% of South Koreans said they would accept a vaccine. South Africans came closer than any other country to the 70% standard, at almost 65%. But only 46.3% of Nigerians said they would do so. This is slightly higher than the results we found in Spain, Sweden, Poland, Brazil and Ecuador.’

Read here (IPS News, Nov 1, 2020)

Human Rights Watch: “Whoever finds the vaccine must share it” — Strengthening human rights and transparency around Covid-19 vaccines

‘The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that the fates of people all over the world are interconnected: protecting one country’s people and its economy from the impacts a deadly infectious disease is impossible unless the people of other countries are also protected. Governments have a critical role to play in funding efforts to develop safe and effective vaccines. But no amount of funding will guarantee equitable access without decisive collective action and global cooperation to challenge the profit-driven and opaque systems that have determined access to lifesaving treatments and vaccines in the past.

‘Governments should continue to fund Covid-19 vaccines, especially to ensure access for low- and middle-income countries. While doing so, they should take all possible measures, including directing and conditioning funds in ways that are aligned with their human rights obligations to share the benefits of scientific knowledge and its applications widely, and ensure participation, transparency, and accountability in vaccine research, development, and manufacturing.’

Read here (Human Rights Watch, Oct 29, 2020)

China wants to supply the world with its coronavirus vaccine

‘China plans to rapidly ramp up its capacity to produce a vaccine for the coronavirus (Covid-19), state media CCTV has announced. It plans to dominate vaccine supply domestically and globally, despite the fact Western nations are unlikely to acquire a Chinese vaccine. It will be pushed to the rest of the world instead. China's vaccine was developed in almost the same way as the "Oxford vaccine" in the UK, using virus enhancement techniques to create an inert but powerful antibody response, which if used with a second booster shot could offer several years of immunity, even against mutant strains, according to Chinese scientists.’

Read here (Asia Times, Oct 21, 2020)

China in talks with WHO over assessing its Covid-19 vaccines for global use

‘China is in talks to have its locally-produced COVID-19 vaccines assessed by the World Health Organization, as a step toward making them available for international use, a WHO official said on Tuesday. Hundreds of thousands of essential workers and other groups considered at high risk in China have been given locally-developed vaccines even as clinical trials had not been fully completed, raising safety concerns among experts.’

Read here (Reuters, Oct 5, 2020)

Covid-19 vaccine leaders make trial plans public in transparency push

‘Makers of the leading coronavirus vaccine candidates disclosed detailed information about their pivotal late-stage clinical trials and how they plan to gauge their shots' safety and effectiveness. The moves by first Moderna Inc, and then later from Pfizer Inc and its partner BioNTech SE, follow increasing worry that the effort to develop a Covid-19 vaccine is becoming politicised, and that an inoculation could be rushed to market before it is proven safe and effective. AstraZeneca said in an e-mail it would share its plans as well, though it hadn't as of Thursday (Sept 17) evening in the US.’

Read here (Straits Times, Sept 18, 2020)

Rich nations have cornered half of future COVID-19 vaccine supply: Oxfam

‘A group of wealthy nations representing 13 per cent of the global population have already bought up more than half of the promised doses of future COVID-19 vaccines, according to a report by Oxfam on Wednesday (Sep 16).

‘The non-governmental organisation analysed deals struck by pharmaceuticals and vaccine producers for the five leading vaccine candidates currently in late-stage trials, based on data collected by the analytics company Airfinity.’

Read here (Channel News Asia, Sept 17, 2020)

Who gets a Covid vaccine first? Access plans are taking shape

‘The WHO’s guidance at this point lists only which groups of people should have priority access to vaccines. The NASEM (US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine) guidance goes a step further by ranking priority groups in order of who should get a vaccine first (see ‘A tiered approach’).

‘After health-care workers, medically vulnerable groups should be among the first to receive a vaccine, according to the NASEM draft plan. These include older people living in crowded settings, and individuals with multiple existing conditions, such as serious heart disease or diabetes, that put them at risk for more-serious COVID-19 infection.

‘The plan prioritizes workers in essential industries, such as public transit, because their jobs place them in contact with many people. Similarly, people who live in certain crowded settings — homeless shelters and prisons, for example — are called out as deserving early access.’

Read here (Nature, Sept 16, 2020)

The cyber side of vaccine nationalism

‘In the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine nationalism has become an important and controversial phenomenon. Rather than cooperate through global mechanisms to develop, manufacture, and distribute a vaccine against the coronavirus, countries with the means to do so have prioritized national access to a vaccine. Despite warnings about its adverse consequences for global health and international cooperation, vaccine nationalism is not abating. The political momentum of vaccine nationalism can be found in not only the pharmaceutical realm but also cyberspace.

‘A New York Times story from September 5 detailed how the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine has produced a proliferation of cyber espionage targeting vaccine research and development. According to the article, the pandemic triggered a shift “for the world’s intelligence agencies, pitting them against each other in a new grand game of spy versus spy” such that “every major spy service around the globe is trying to find out what everyone else is up to.”

Read here (Council on Foreign Relations, Sept 14, 2020)

Covid-19 vaccine makers issue rare safety pledge as fears of political pressures swirl

‘A coalition of nine pharmaceutical chief executives issued a joint pledge Tuesday that they will not rush the development of a COVID-19 vaccination for political purposes and will not seek approvals until the vaccines have gone through Phase 3 clinical trials.

‘The unusual joint move from nine industry leaders comes after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notified states to be ready to distribute a vaccine to certain groups just two days before the presidential election, stoking concerns that the Trump administration may be putting political pressure on companies and health officials to fast-track vaccine approvals ahead of the November vote.’

Read here (ABC News, Sept 8, 2020) 

WHO suffers setback on its plan for global vaccine access facility

‘The World Health Organization appears to have suffered a setback in its major global initiative for a Covid-19 vaccine procurement facility, as the United States and other major industrialized nations remain reluctant to sign up to the scheme in combating the worsening pandemic which has so far claimed more than 842,000 lives.

‘Despite repeated warnings in August by the WHO director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, that “no one is safe until everyone is safe; no one country has access to research and development, manufacturing and all the supply chain for essential medicines and materials,” the major pharmaceutical producing countries are increasingly pursuing “nationalist” initiatives instead of multilateral schemes, according to media reports.’

Read here (Third World Network, Sept 3, 2020)

How to decide who should get a Covid-19 vaccine first

‘If and when a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine is available, what is the fairest way to distribute it? In a policy report published on Thursday in Science, 19 public health experts laid out an ethical framework called the Fair Priority Model. It is geared toward three principles: benefiting people and limiting harm, prioritizing countries already disadvantaged by poverty or low life expectancy, and avoiding discrimination.

‘The report is critical of previously suggested vaccine allocation plans, including two proposed by the World Health Organization: one of them would distribute vaccines to each country according to its population size, and the other would prioritize health care workers and adults who are above age 65 or have underlying health conditions.’

Read here (Scientific American, Sept 3, 2020)

What happens if China gets the Covid-19 vaccine first?

‘Fidler [David Fidler, an expert on global health and national security who has consulted for the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] thinks it’s too much to hope that geopolitics can stop interfering with public health. The current clash between the U.S. and China means the era of U.S.-led altruistic health initiatives done without the motivation of power over a rival, like President George W. Bush’s PEPFAR program to fight infectious diseases in Africa, is over. Today, great powers will try to press their advantage in whatever ways they can.

‘But China and the U.S. can try to keep the competition from spiraling out of control and destroying public health in its wake. In past eras of multipolar rivalry, antagonists have been able to set limits to that competition, singling out certain areas in which they can turn down the heat and cooperate a bit more. The U.S. and China could do that today, Fidler suggests, perhaps by agreeing to take their hands off the WHO.

‘That needs to happen soon. Because right now, nothing is off-limits—which means neither is the destruction of decades worth of public health norms. “If we don’t have some sort of global health détente between Beijing and Washington,” warns Fidler, “we’re in real trouble.”

Read here (Politico, August 31, 2020) 

How the race for a Covid-19 vaccine is getting dirty

‘Political pressure has been mounting for scientists to deliver an economy-saving result, and reports of corner-cutting emerge daily... Nor is it just politicians who are in a hurry. On 2 August, Steven Salzberg, a computational biologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, suggested in Forbes magazine that a promising vaccine be rolled out to a wider pool of volunteers before clinical trials had been completed, triggering an outcry (and some sympathy) that prompted him to recant the next day. Meanwhile, a research group with links to Harvard University continues to defend its publication in July of a recipe for a DIY Covid-19 vaccine – one that only the group’s 20-odd members had previously tested.’ 

Read here (The Guardian, August 30, 2020)

Approval of a coronavirus vaccine would be just the beginning – Huge production challenges could cause long delays

‘There are four main challenges that must be addressed as soon as possible if a vaccine is to be produced quickly and at a large scale. (1) Existing manufacturing capacity is limited (2) The type of vaccine is still unknown (3) The size of the problem is unprecedented (4) “Economic poker game” of seeking to minimize costs and maximize revenue.’

Read here (IPS News, August 25, 2020)

The unequal scramble for coronavirus vaccines — by the numbers

‘Wealthy countries have struck deals to buy more than two billion doses of coronavirus vaccine in a scramble that could leave limited supplies in the coming year. Meanwhile, an international effort to acquire vaccines for low- and middle-income countries is struggling to gain traction.’

Read here (Nature, August 24, 2020)