Addressing inequity in vaccine access – POLITICO

As G20 health ministers meet in Yogyakarta on June 20-21 to continue to tackle COVID-19 and prepare for future pandemics, there is an opportunity to learn lessons and ensure we fight future outbreaks more effectively than we did the last one.

One of the major successes in the COVID-19 response has been without doubt the development and deployment of vaccines in a timespan previously unimaginable. With SARS-CoV-2 spreading to all corners of the world, killing almost 2 million people in 2020, speed was a driving force in achieving this success. What was missed however, was imperative to secure global access to these products once they became available.

Support for initiatives like COVAX, set up to distribute vaccines more equitably, came late, and vaccination rates in low-income countries remain low. As of June 2022, approximately 65 percent of the world’s population had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine; among low-income countries, the rate averaged 15 percent. Low vaccination rates remain a key risk to extending the pandemic, not least through the emergency of new COVID-19 variants.

This inequity didn’t have to happen. There are models of responses to other infectious diseases prior to COVID-19 that offered a template on how to respond to pandemics more equitably.

In the response to ongoing major epidemics like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, as well as other neglected infectious diseases, innovative public-private partnerships were created several decades ago to develop vaccines, medicines, diagnostics and other health technologies to make these products accessible to people most impacted by these diseases, notably in low-resource settings.

The assets, expertise and global partnerships of Product Development Partnerships (PDPs), combined with their ability to work end-to-end across the R&D continuum, from discovery to access, can enhance preparedness for and response to future pandemics. PDPs products have reached more than 2.4 billion people around the world, often in low-resource settings and PDP partners are working to tackle the COVID-19 response, such as FIND, the global diagnostics alliance co-chairing the diagnostics pillar for the ACT-Accelerator, or IAVI’s work to apply its vaccine platform to develop a COVID vaccine that is particularly suited for use in low-resource settings.

Beyond developing products that can be used and accessed globally, strengthened and sustained health R&D and innovation systems in low- and middle-income countries will be needed for a more equitable response to future pandemics. Much of those efforts to date have focused on building manufacturing facilities in Africa, with the African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention aiming to locally manufacture 60 percent of Africa’s vaccine needs by 2040. Those efforts are urgently needed — a major contributor to vaccine access inequity was the large dependency of countries in Africa on vaccine supply from the U.S. and…