PART III: Finish off Covid19. Hurry.
How do we manufacture vaccines for 7.8 billion people?
This is the third part of the Cosmopolitan Globalists’ blueprint for ending the pandemic. We argue that the United States must immediately lead the democratic world in a program to eradicate Covid19 globally.
We believe it feasible to vaccinate the entire planet by the end of 2021, if the US has the will to do it. It will be costly. But the cost is a fraction, and very likely only a small fraction, of the cost of allowing the disease to spread uncontrolled. Even if the United States assumed the entire cost of vaccinating the world—and clearly this would not be necessary—the cost would amount to a rounding error in the proposed USD 1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan.
We urge President Biden personally to take charge of this. This is a global emergency with implications far beyond the Americans’ health. Controlling the pandemic is essential to rescuing the global economy, which is essential to American national security and the security of American allies. The excessively cautious and dilatory FDA can’t be expected to have this perspective. But the President can. The FDA and other American bureaucracies must not be allowed to plod along at their typical, risk-averse pace. The President must take charge of the global pandemic response. This, not a speech at the Munich Security Conference, is the test of whether “America is back.” To be a global leader, Americans must lead the globe.
In Part I, we reviewed the strengths and weaknesses of available vaccines and therapies. In Part II, we argued that fast tests, and every vaccine with a tolerable safety profile, must be approved immediately.
Today, we explain how to manufacture enough doses of vaccine for everyone on the planet.
We encourage you to share this blueprint with your elected representatives.
By Owen Lewis and the Cosmopolitan Globalists
How many doses do we need?
We’ve solved the problem of designing a safe and effective vaccine against Covid19 and done so in record time. Now, all 7.8 billion of us need at least one, and often two, injections.
Wealthier and more-developed countries can manufacture or buy their own vaccines. But many poorer and less-developed countries can’t. Some have significant manufacturing capacity. India, for example, is a pharmaceutical powerhouse; it is already the source of more than half of the global vaccine supply. But many countries have no domestic vaccine manufacturing capacity at all, nor can they afford to buy them in the quantity they need.
Some wealthy countries have already reserved doses far in excess of their populations. The UK, for example, has ordered five doses for every citizen. In part, this is because governments haven’t known which vaccine candidates would prove safest and most effective and so they hedged their bets.
Most wealthy countries have reserved at least as many doses as they need to ensure all of their citizens are vaccinated. But poorer countries have been unable to do anything of the sort. Most countries in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and South America have reserved less than half the amount of vaccine they need. Many countries have reserved less than five percent.
World map of vaccine contracts, from Bloomberg
A reserved vaccine is not the same thing as a manufactured vaccine, however. Manufacturing will have to be ramped up significantly just to meet the wealthy countries’ targets. To meet the target of vaccinating the whole world by the end of 2021, manufacturing must be ramped up very significantly.
Our goal is global herd immunity. We reach herd immunity when enough of the population is immune, through vaccination or prior exposure, that the disease can no longer spread. How many doses of vaccines must the world make to achieve this by the end of 2021? Pick a number between 50 and 100 percent of the total global population, and (depending on the vaccine in question), double it.
The number is imprecise because we don’t yet know it. The threshold number is an empirical statistic, not a guess; we will only know it when we have more experience. The threshold for polio is about 80 percent; for measles, 95 percent. Given the infectiousness of Covid19, the number is probably on the higher end. Because we don’t know, we’ve based our calculations on a goal of 100 percent coverage. The closer we are to 100 percent, the better our chances of conquering the disease and forestalling mutations.
Remember that no vaccine is 100 percent effective. The threshold for herd immunity may be 80 percent, but this doesn’t mean herd immunity is achieved when 80 percent of the population is vaccinated. It’s achieved when 80 percent of the population is immune. Depending on the efficacy of the vaccine—and on levels of immunity already present in the population—it may not be necessary to vaccinate 80 percent of the public. Or it may be necessary to vaccinate more of it.
The world’s population, by the end of 2021, will be 7.95 billion. So we must manufacture nearly 16 billion injections, even though herd immunity might well be achieved at 80 percent coverage or less. We should be preparing, now, for the worst-case scenario, not the best.
How close are we to doing this, given current production schedules? The good news is we’re not all that far off.
The production schedule
Pfizer, Sanofi, and Moderna, will produce 3.1 billion doses of mRNA vaccine in 2021, enough to vaccinate 1.55 billion people. Novartis has just signed an agreement to produce Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine. All together, they will produce 3.2 billion doses of mRNA vaccine, enough for 1.6 billion people.
Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine must be stored at a very low temperature, which is a severe logistical constraint. Failure to observe temperature specifications at any part of the cold chain renders the vaccine useless. Generally, vaccines must be transported between 2-8°C. Pfizer’s vaccine must be stored at -70°C. Moderna vaccine’s is slightly less demanding, but still needs to be transported at -20°C. Pfizer has developed special packaging that allows the vaccine to be stored for ten days on dry ice. It’s carrying out tests to evaluate the vaccine’s stability at the more traditional temperatures of 2-8°C, and it’s exploring methods for transporting it at room temperature. Wherever electricity is unstable, as Texas recently discovered, the vaccines spoil. Barring an innovation that solves this problem, we believe it is only suitable for use in the rich world and in urban areas of poor countries.
Other vaccines can make up the shortfall. The AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine is 82.4 percent protective, and it can be stored at refrigerator temperature. We expect it to be used broadly in rich and poor countries alike. AstraZeneca/Oxford predicts it will make 3 billion doses this year, enough to protect 1.5 billion people.
Trial data published in The Lancet suggests, to our surprise, that Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine works extremely well, with a 91.6 percent efficacy rate. Russia says it will produce 1.4 billion doses in 2021, enough to vaccinate .7 billion people. Like Moderna’s vaccine, the Sputnik V must be kept very cold. It is poorly suited to undeveloped rural areas. But some 30 countries around the world have ordered it anyway, including Turkey, which will manufacture it; Mexico; and much of Central and South America.
China expects to produce 1.1 billion doses of its Sinopharm vaccine by the end of this year, enough to cover .55 billion people. Its estimated efficacy is 79.3 percent, which means it can render .44 billion people immune. Sinovac is quickly adding production capacity with a goal of producing a billion doses in 2021, enough to vaccinate half a billion people, although the news from Brazil is not encouraging: Its efficacy may be low as 50.4 percent. Reducing vulnerability to the disease by half is better than nothing, of course.
The single-shot CanSino vaccine hasn’t yet received full approval from the Chinese government. Initial data, not yet peer reviewed, suggests an efficacy rate of 65.7 percent, on par with the still-unapproved Johnson & Johnson vaccine based on the same technology. Early estimates suggest they’ll make between 0.1 and 0.2 billion doses in 2021. All three of China’s vaccines may be stored at refrigerator temperature.
Covaxin is in wide use as part of India’s national vaccination campaign, but we’re still unsure how well it works. It’s stable at refrigerator temperature. African countries, in particular, are keen to purchase it. Manufacturers expect to make .7 billion doses this year, enough to vaccinate .35 billion people.
The Novavax and Johnson & Johnson vaccines can be stored at refrigerator temperature. Johnson & Johnson’s is 66 percent effective in preventing moderate to severe disease. The company expects to produce a billion doses by the end of the year. It’s a single-shot vaccine, so that means a billion more people vaccinated, even if the protection it offers is not as complete.
The Novavax vaccine’s efficacy is much better, at 89.3 percent, bringing it close to Moderna’s and Pfizer’s. With its manufacturing partners, including the Serum Institute of India, Novavax should be able to produce a billion doses in 2021, enough to vaccinate half a billion people.
So how close are we to having the number of injections we need? If everything goes without a hitch, 6.8 billion people can be vaccinated by the end of 2021. If all of these vaccines make it into our arms, and if the threshold for herd immunity is on the lower end of the scale, this should be enough to end the nightmare.
But it isn’t realistic to assume everything will go without a hitch. What’s more, none of these vaccines are 100 percent effective, and the threshold for herd immunity might easily be higher. So we must manufacture more.
Encourage collaboration
Meeting this demand will require collaboration among manufacturers. The WHO initially encouraged manufacturers voluntarily to share their data and intellectual property in the Covid19 Technology Access Pool, but the pharmaceutical industry wasn’t keen: Their knowhow, after all, is the result of considerable investment.
As the pressure on manufacturing pipelines grows, however, it has become obvious that secrecy is an obstacle. Some companies have voluntarily begun sharing their information. The Department of Justice recently gave six biopharma companies permission under antitrust law to share their research on monoclonal antibody candidates. We want to encourage vaccine companies to do the same, and we should make it easy for them to do so. The Biden Administration should facilitate and encourage this at every turn, making federal funding contingent upon it. Knowledge of manufacturing obstacles—and techniques for solving them—should likewise be pooled to the greatest extent possible.
It would be useful for the Biden Administration to create an international platform to coordinate contracts among vaccine manufacturers, contractors, distributors, governments, and donors. If governments and donors agree to allocate funding only to companies that use the platform, it would result in significant efficiencies. Companies using platform would benefit from a guarantee that their capacity will be used. If their candidate fails, they could be enrolled automatically as a licensed manufacturer of a successful vaccine. Governments, in turn, would benefit from spreading the risk among vaccine candidates, If one fails, there will be others to take its place.
Appropriate the IP
Breaking the production bottleneck and expanding manufacturing capacity will require widespread technology transfer. Companies must share their knowledge, technology, and data with other manufacturers.
This can be done through second-source agreements, in which a company contracts with another company to produce its vaccine. Some developers have agreements to this effect already: AstraZeneca and Novavax have agreements with the Serum Institute of India, for example.
The US government can make closer collaboration a condition of its contracts with vaccine manufacturers. It can insist, for example, that companies conduct engineering and stability studies jointly to save resources and time.
Another way to ramp up production is to make vaccine technology public domain. This would let companies around the world manufacture and distribute vaccines without paying royalties to their creators. The original companies could still make and sell their vaccines, but public domain designation would allow production to scale up much faster than any single company could manage. This would also help to remove production bottlenecks and lower the unit cost of the vaccine.
The obvious candidates for this are the smaller companies that received money through Operation Warp Speed: Moderna and Novavax. Pfizer conducted its research on its own dime. But we propose that Pfizer’s intellectual property be appropriated, too.
We hear gasps from our readers. That’s theft. You can’t do that to Big Pharma!
Our readers are right to be alarmed by this idea. Appropriating intellectual property without compensation would hobble future efforts to develop essential medications and vaccines. This will not be the last pandemic; indeed, for a number of environmental reasons, we should expect them to occur more frequently in the coming century. Pfizer is the only reason we have any hope of eradicating this pandemic in 2021. We can’t just appropriate its IP. That would kill the golden goose.
So we propose appropriating its IP and compensating them so handsomely that they’re eager to do it again. We suspect six billion dollars in cash would keep them sweet, but this is no time to be stingy. Ask them what they want. (Don’t say, “Our bottom line is whatever you ask.” But that should, in fact, be the bottom line.)
The US government isn’t legally required to compensate Moderna, but it should do it anyway, to preserve the incentive to produce these kinds of vaccines. Four billion dollars, we think, would make for a handsome incentive. If the UK and Sweden did the same for the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, production could be ramped up rapidly.
Predictable obstacles
Manufacturing setbacks must be expected. Consider how many have happened already happened. Pfizer’s shipments were delayed, in January, because it had to retool its plant in Belgium.
Moderna’s vaccine has also been delayed owing to the challenge, the manufacturers say, of ramping up their plant in Switzerland. Shipments have been reduced to parts of Europe and Canada. AstraZeneca has suffered manufacturing glitches so severe that in the first quarter, its Belgian facility was unable to provide 60 percent of the contracted doses to the EU.
Russia has so far had difficulty producing enough of the second shot of their Sputnik V vaccine.
The choke points are predictable: raw materials, glass vials, cell cultures, and enzymes must be sourced; new plants and equipment must be built. If any component in the chain is missing or delayed, the vaccine will be, too. Vaccination has been held up for lack of low dead-space syringes, for example, which minimize the amount of vaccine wasted in the needle. By using these syringes, a sixth dose can be extracted from what is usually a five-dose bottle. This would augment Pfizer’s 2.2 billion doses by .44 billion, which means another .22 billion people protected. Until now, these syringes were typically used only for extremely expensive medications, so manufacturing capacity for them is limited. More must be built.
The Biden Administration plans to use the Defense Production Act to increase syringe supply, which is exactly what it should do.
Solve these problems now, not later
But this should have been done last year, not now. The manufacturing and logistical problems we will face in the coming year are predictable, and should be solved now, not when they inevitably arise.
The Biden Administration should be working in close cooperation with the pharmaceutical and logistics industry, now, to anticipate every manufacturing challenge that might arise from increasing scale. Wherever it would expedite vaccine production and shipment, Biden should invoke the Defense Production Act.
Many shortfalls are predictable. The top two US manufacturers of vials, for example, can produce 280 million vials per year. These will hold 2.8 billion doses. That’s not enough. The suppliers of niche chemical and biological vaccine components are spread around the world. Everyone is competing for their products. The number of US companies capable of loading mRNA into lipid nanoparticles and purifying the vaccines at the scale we need is inadequate.
What component materials does Pfizer need for its special packaging? Now’s the time to make sure there will be enough. The US and Canada together manufacture between 30,000 and 35,000 tons of dry ice annually. That’s not enough. What if Pfizer is successful in developing a method for transporting its vaccine at traditional temperatures? We need to reserve enough of every component material it might use to do this, now.
Redundancies need to be built into the supply chain, now. Every warehouse with an ultracold freezer needs a store of dry ice should the freezer fail. If in six months’ time the Cosmopolitan Globalists read that a shipment of vaccines has perished because a warehouse freezer suffered a power outage, we will be apoplectic. This is a predictable and preventable problem. There is no excuse for it.
The vaccines, whatever their market price, will be more precious than diamonds. As we saw at the beginning of the pandemic, when PPE was heisted around the world, this means vaccines will be stolen. Organized crime groups are looking for ways to steal these vaccines, now—so we must be looking for ways to ensure they don’t.
Similarly, we should expect more large-scale cyber-attacks aimed at disrupting vaccine production and transport. The usual culprits are involved. We must establish a platform, now, for sharing threat intelligence among governments and manufacturers to provide better warning of impending attacks.
What about IT? Can our logistics companies handle the necessary exchange of data? If not, this must be solved, now. Supply chains usually link many different companies and subcontractors, each of which handles a leg on the route. Now’s the time for an inventory of every company and stage—manufacturers, air cargo carriers, airports, ground handling agents, freight forwarders, transport companies, warehouse operators, vaccination centers—to assess their capacity. What do they lack? What might they lack? Every step of the journey should be modeled and simulated, now. We do not want to discover at the last minute which airports lack temporary air storage capacity.
What raw materials need to be reserved to build cold-chain storage facilities? Reserve them, now. What about sensors to monitor temperatures? Build them, now. Is there a central IT platform to track receipt of these measurements?
The Biden Administration can help to finance redundancies across the supply chain. In exchange, manufacturers should obey guidelines ensuring a diversity of global suppliers so that none will be made hostage to diplomacy or misfortune. Contracts with manufacturers should include incentives for companies to invest, now, in scaling production and stockpiling goods. The operative principle should be the opposite of the just-in-time ethos management has spent decades cultivating. If it is done correctly, there will be waste.
We must also plan, now, for the possibility of mutations that render our vaccines ineffective. Mutations are inevitable. That’s what viruses do. This is another reason vastly to ramp up manufacturing capacity—today. It’s all but certain we’ll need it.
And hurry.
In the next two installments in this series, we will discuss the remaining big problems to be solved. First, the logistical challenge of shipping and administering these vaccines is enormous.
Second, the anti-vaccination movement must be comprehensively defeated.
I'm chomping at the bit for the final installments already.
Congratulations on an excellent article. There are many good suggestions in this installment of the series just as there were in the previous installments. Sadly, it is a virtual certainty that few if any of the suggestions itemized by the Cosmopolitan Globalists will ever be enacted. It’s a shame really, because if the Cosmopolitan Globalists were running the FDA and EMA, the pandemic might actually be brought under control.
The people actually calling the shots, the government bureaucrats and their allies in the academic community who sit on the powerful advisory boards of the regulatory agencies, true to form, are behaving like little more than languid sybarites.
They feel far more allegiance to the bureaucratic norms (which don’t work that well even in normal times) than they do to solving the biggest global emergency since the Second World War. The bureaucrats who’ve risen through the ranks into senior decision-making positions have gotten where they are by worshipping at the altar of a sclerotic approval process, not smashing that altar to smithereens.
There’s an irony here that Claire Berlinski in particular will, I suspect, hesitate to acknowledge. She wants President Biden to take charge, bypass the bureaucratic nonsense and lead the world out of the crisis. Does that sound like President Biden to anyone who has paid attention to his career?
President Biden as well as his entire political party (along with most members of the GOP) has spent decades accreting that bureaucracy. It’s as massive and inefficient as it is because that’s what Democrats have encouraged in every election since World War II. That’s also what cosmopolitans and globalists have encouraged; it’s part and parcel of their ideology. As for the EU; it’s even worse.
Call it the administrative state or the deep state; the label doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is ill-suited to address the current crisis and the idea that Joe Biden, a man with deep reverence for this bureaucracy would walk away from doesn’t pass the smell test.
There was one person who might have told the bureaucrats at the FDA and CDC (and to a lesser extent the NIH) to take a flying you know what; his name was Donald Trump. No one can be sure of what Trump would have done and he surely wouldn’t have tried to lead the world out of the crisis. But he would have been far more likely to overrule the bureaucrats (who he couldn’t stand) than Biden is. Perhaps this might have helped lead the United States out of the pandemic and set a good example for the rest of the world. Even those with Trump Derangement Syndrome should, if they are honest, admit that Operation Warp Speed (championed by Trump) was the most successful American endeavor since the Apollo Mission. Of course, had Trump been re-elected and if he had followed the recommendations outlined in this essay to a tee, the bureaucrats, the academic community, the press and Democratic politicians would have accused him of being anti-science. In fact, our hosts, the Cosmopolitan Globalists would probably have accused him of being anti-science. The real problem is that making bureaucrats and academics the sole arbiters of what scientific fact is, insures that the prejudices and bigotries of those communities sets the final agenda. Call it by it’s real name; the autocracy of the “experts.”
Unless I missed it, one issue the article didn’t address in depth is the durability of protection offered by the various vaccines. If the durability of protection is short or the vaccines need to be tweaked for new variants, it may be necessary to inoculate people periodically, perhaps yearly. Over years or decades (until the patents of the vaccines expire-which is continuously extended if vaccines are adjusted to protect from new variants) the companies will make lots of money. $6 billion to compensate the companies for appropriating their IP doesn’t even come close.
There’s another reason that fair compensation for the IP attributable to the vaccine will need to be far greater than the author anticipates. The valuable IP is not in the genetic coding for spike protein; it’s in the vector. In a certain way, the companies see the Covid vaccines as a loss leader. Whether it’s the polyethylene glycol for the Moderna vaccine and the Pfizer vaccine or the various adenoviruses used by Janssen and AstraZeneca, it’s the delivery devices for the antigen that matter.
These companies all see the possibility of replacing all vaccines currently available (dead and attenuated virus vaccines) with this new technology. Lots of money to be made there. Then there’s the annual flu vaccine and the potential possibility of a universal flu vaccine. If one or more of these technologies could be harnessed to an antigen that provided universal protection from flu, that alone would be worth far more than $6 billion.
Then there’s the grand prize; it’s what Pfizer, Moderna and many others were working on long before Covid came along; the possibility of vaccines against various forms of cancer. That’s why the mRNA vaccines we’re fortuitously ready to role when Covid came along; companies were perfecting the technologies to immunize against cancer. Asking these companies to forgo IP for Covid or to accept compensation far less than a cancer vaccine would be worth is a sure fire was to stop biomedical innovation dead in its tracks.