The curious struggle of Asia to vaccinate its citizens

Asian countries that led control of Covid-19 last year have become retarded in the battle against the virus, as their efforts to vaccinate their populations lag behind other parts of the world.

Launch issues vary from country to country, but in most of Asia one factor is constant: lack of vaccines administer. Having not developed or produced vaccines at home, many Asian countries have to wait for deliveries from Europe or the United States, leaving them at the end of the queue.

Although Asia has become the world’s factory, representing an increasingly dominant part of the world economy, the race for vaccines has shown that it is still lagging behind in pharmaceuticals.

Between advanced economies, Japan, South Korea and Australia are people in trouble: Japan has administered only 6.3 doses of vaccine per 100 people, compared to 90 in the UK. In large developing economies, such as Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, inoculation campaigns have barely begun.

India has a large vaccine manufacturing capacity, but has administered only 14 injections per 100 people and is in control of a devastating outbreak of Covid-19. Even China, which contained the virus and created its own vaccines, has only given 36 doses per 100 people.

Scientists and industry analysts pointed out several reasons why Asia has fought. The relative success of the region in controlling Covid-19 meant less political pressure for vaccines. Fewer patients who became ill resulted in slow results in clinical trials. And Asia lacks global pharmaceutical companies capable of enrolling patients worldwide.

“There is no equivalent to Pfizer in Asia,” said Ken Ishii, a professor of vaccine science at the University of Tokyo.

Outbreaks of Sars, Mers and bird flu in recent decades have meant that Asian public health systems were well prepared, but this had mixed implications for vaccines. After Sars, China began to take vaccine development seriously, but Japan spent billions of yen in a flu factory, a wrong technology for Covid-19.

Perhaps the biggest vaccine surprise in Asia is the struggle of India. It is the home of the Serum Institute of India, the largest vaccine manufacturer in the world, which produces approximately 60 to 70 m of the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine per month.

India also has the capacity to develop its own vaccines. Bharat Biotech launched Covaxin, an inactivated coronavirus vaccine, which was approved for emergency use in January. However, the company’s production has been limited to about 20 million doses per month.

Like several other countries in the region, India’s apparent success in controlling the virus prevented governments from investing in vaccines with the urgency of Europe or the United States, where the pandemic was raging. and normal life closed.

“The government seriously believed that Covid-19 would disappear in January and had no plan B,” said Murali Neelakantan, a former global adviser to the pharmaceutical companies Cipla and Glenmark.

Companies did not want to invest in increasing capacity because “the Indian government drowned out the signal of the demand that the pandemic is over,” Neelakantan said. “It wouldn’t have cost much, that’s what hurts.”

Similarly, Japan did not give priority vaccine development, said Ishii. Although the country’s researchers produced multiple candidates, including cutting-edge DNA and RNA spikes, none of them advanced beyond small-scale trials.

Japan was not unique in this, he said, pointing to nations such as France and Switzerland and large pharmaceutical companies such as GSK, Sanofi and Merck, which have also struggled to get vaccines.

What he did demonstrate, Ishii said, was the need to combine cutting-edge science, the organizational influence of the big pharmaceutical company, and an attitude of government that is no object. “If BioNTech were just a single company in Germany, it would not have been able to make the vaccine available as Pfizer did,” he said.

The picture is similar in South Korea, where the industry has focused on contract manufacturing, said a local analyst, who did not want to be appointed. “It takes a lot of money, technology and researchers to develop new vaccines in a short time, but South Korea lacks all of them,” the analyst said.

China is the Asian exception. Its success in the development and mass production of vaccines shows that the capacity is not exclusive to Europe and the United States. In fact, the slow progress of its vaccination partly reflects Beijing’s determination to be a world leader in pharmaceuticals.

Chinese manufacturers export almost half of their production to meet that of Beijing diplomatic promises on vaccination abroad. Zhong Nanshan, a leading Chinese epidemiologist and government adviser, said this month that the vaccination rate was still “far from enough” to secure the herd’s immunity.

For a five-year horizon, said Margaret Labban, a senior life sciences analyst at IHS Markit in London: “We look forward to it. . . that China will emerge as a truly global and competitive player in the biotechnology industry and completely overthrow the traditional form of pharmaceutical innovation ”.

Additional reports by Edward White and Song Jung-a in Seoul and Christian Shepherd in Beijing