Analytics company Airfinity estimates the G7 and EU will have an excess of 1 billion vaccine doses by the end of 2021, of which 10% are expected to expire.
When factoring the time taken to distribute and administer the doses in Lower Income Countries (LICs) and Lower Middle Income Countries (LMICs), the proportion rises. Many of these countries will refuse vaccines that don’t have at least a two month shelf life. Taking into account this two month shelf, 241 million doses could be wasted by the end of 2021, amounting to a quarter of the G7 and EU surplus stock.
The available vaccines in the G7 and EU, together with already purchased doses and COVAX deliveries, are sufficient for LICs and LMICs to vaccinate 70% of their populations by May 2022. Airfinity estimates that total global COVID cases are likely to exceed 400 million by mid-2022 and immediately redistributing vaccines could potentially avert nearly 1 million deaths from the virus in that time frame.
“Currently doses tend to get shared in low volumes, at short notice, and with shorter than ideal expiry dates – making it a huge logistical lift to allocate and deliver these to countries able to absorb them,” says Aurélia Nguyen, managing director of the COVAX facility.
Vaccine manufacturers are now making 1.5bn doses every month.
“They’re producing a huge number of doses. It has scaled up immensely over the last three or four months,” Dr Matt Linley, lead researcher at Airfinity, told BBC News.
“I don’t think it was necessarily rich countries being greedy, it’s more that they didn’t know which vaccines would work,” says Dr Linley. “So they had to purchase several of them.”
Airfinity hopes to show governments that there are enough vaccines to fulfil their needs, and thanks to this secure supply they can donate without stockpiling.
“They don’t want to be caught off guard,” said Agathe Demarais. “It’s also about domestic political pressure because part of the electorate would probably be very unhappy to see vaccines being donated, if there is a feeling that they’re still needed at home.”
Co-founder and CEO of Airfinity, Rasmus Bech Hansen said: “The world has witnessed two extraordinary scientific achievements in the pandemic: The fast development of highly effective vaccines and the unprecedented scale up of production.For the world to get the full benefit of this, our data shows, we need a third equally unprecedented achievement: A large scale, rapid, globally coordinated, science driven vaccination campaign.”
Source: Airfinity
