But without guarantees and coordination, individual governments will revert to self-defeating vaccine nationalism. Skillfully combining those inputs into vaccine output and then guaranteeing access to the final doses and related supplies through international trade will require trust among governments that is currently in short supply. That’s why a global coordinating body will also be needed to help some countries scale up the production of early stage ingredients and critical equipment, knowing they can incentivize other countries to subsidize expansion of later steps in the manufacturing process that will also need to be scaled up. Governments and philanthropists have worked together to scale up HIV medicines and pediatric vaccines, but the level of policy cooperation needed for COVID-19 vaccine production is, admittedly, unprecedented. But it needs to be better organized and subsidized at multiple levels. The vaccine manufacturing supply chain is already global. The United States needs to do something new: Devote resources and engage both domestic and international sources in coordinated, targeted investments to build on the existing global infrastructure of labs and manufacturers that produce specialized inputs for the vaccines, whether the drugs or syringes or vials that contain them. There is much that the United States can do to help replicate the success of Operation Warp Speed on a worldwide scale to get billions of doses to a global population. But a focus on hoarding alone threatens to miss one crucial point. It is certainly problematic that the United States and some other countries are hoarding doses and critical vaccine supplies for their own domestic populations. Only a handful of countries are able to manufacture these vaccines at the scale needed to overcome infections and deaths that are still growing-and shifting due to the emergence of viral variants. Global demand for vaccine doses dwarfs the supply. The crash effort that went from science labs to vaccine distribution began under the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed and has continued and expanded under the Biden administration.Īs Americans prepare to emerge from the pandemic, however, much of the world is still living a nightmare. American policymakers made large advance purchases of potential vaccines and supported some sponsors-such as Moderna and Johnson & Johnson-carrying out clinical trials, while simultaneously working with myriad far-flung and lesser-known contract manufacturers and suppliers of equipment and ingredients (from cellular material to glass tubing to syringes), to actually produce the vaccines and related supplies.
No less impressive, however, is the work of the US government in organizing and subsidizing a complex supply chain for manufacturing and distributing the COVID-19 vaccine. The unprecedented development of several effective COVID-19 vaccines in less than a year is an historic achievement in the annals of scientific research.
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