Drug firms should share vaccine-making capacity: WHO chief

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called on more pharmaceutical companies on Friday to share manufacturing facilities to help ramp up the production of Covid-19 vaccines.

The WHO also said its technical advisers would meet next week to assess versions of the AstraZeneca vaccine from the Serum Institute of India (SII), the largest vaccine maker, and from South Korea’s SK Bioscience ahead of a possible WHO emergency listing.

The WHO chief called on Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers to scale up production significantly and urged countries to share vaccine doses once they finish vaccinating their priority populations.

Tedros repeated his plea for rich nations to share doses with poorer countries once they have vaccinated health workers and older people.

Reiterating the negative impact of inequitable access to Covid-19 vaccines worldwide at a press briefing, Tedros said that although globally the number of vaccine doses administered already exceeds the number of reported infections, more than three-quarters of those vaccines have been administered in just ten countries that account for almost 60 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP). Meanwhile, 2.5 billion people in almost 130 countries have yet to receive a single dose.

(China Daily)