AstraZeneca makes the vaccine for everyone.
The biotech pioneers Biontech and Moderna dominated the headlines with their vaccines. These drugs will probably mainly go to rich and industrialized countries. The hope of poorer countries, in particular, rests much more on Astrazeneca and Oxford University.
At first glance, the third corona vaccine’s effectiveness, which has now completed clinical testing, seems to lag a little behind the first two active ingredients. For the global overcoming of the pandemic, the product AZD1222 from the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca is likely to play a more significant role than the vaccines from competitors Biontech and Pfizer as well as Moderna.
According to data from the health industry consultancy Airfinity, orders have already been placed for 3.2 billion doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. The vast majority of these are for countries outside of Europe and North America. Pfizer and Biontech have orders for approximately 1.1 billion cans and Moderna for 777 million. Most of these orders come from European countries and the USA. All companies are still in negotiations with states and international organizations for further deliveries.
“These prices carry the risk that the vaccines remain inaccessible to a large part of humanity,”
The division of markets and the different orders of magnitude can be explained by the fundamentally different vaccine development approach and manufacture. The German startup Biontech has teamed up with the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer for the corona vaccine, and the US competitor Moderna is working with a new biotechnical process that has never been brought to market before. As far as is known so far, the prices should be between 20 and 40 dollars per vaccination dose.
“These prices carry the risk that the vaccines remain inaccessible to a large part of humanity,” warns the health expert for the human rights organization Human Rights Watch Margaret Wurth to Bloomberg. According to the contracts known so far, deliveries of these high-tech vaccines should go mainly to Europe and USA’s rich industrialized countries, at least in the first few months.
AstraZeneca makes the vaccine for everyone.
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