“Investing to provide all regions of the world with state-of-the-art production infrastructure is a valuable asset for our common health security”

Lequalities have weighed on the response to harmful pathogens. Take the example of Covid-19: a record 11.9 billion doses of vaccines have been administered worldwide, helping many countries to reverse the trend of the pandemic. Yet more than 80% of the African population has not received a single dose approximately eighteen months after the first vaccination.

As long as these inequalities persist, we can neither protect populations against new variants of the virus nor end the acute phase of this pandemic.

Thanks to groundbreaking innovations, effective vaccines against Covid-19 have been developed in record time. However, at the start of the vaccination campaign, the production of vaccines and other health technologies was confined to a few, mostly wealthy countries.

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The poorest countries found themselves at the back of the pack. Since then, the situation has changed, and supply exceeds demand on a global scale. The international community, under the aegis of theACT Accelerator and the mechanism Covaxhas played a crucial role in this regard, thus confirming that the response to scourges like Covid-19 requires a high level of preparedness and new ways of working in order to protect public health.

A more reliable and fairer supply

The main issues today are how to ensure that vaccines remain effective, build the capacity of national public health systems to deliver doses, increase vaccine uptake, and tackle the pervasive misinformation that fuels reluctance to the vaccination.

An obvious lesson to be learned from this pandemic is that we need to increase local and regional production of vaccines and other essential health products, in low- and middle-income countries. This will allow both direct access to vaccines and the establishment of conditions conducive to local production. So in the next crisis, supply will be more reliable and equitable, provided global supply chains are not interrupted.

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The World Health Organization (WHO), the African Union, the European Union, the governments of South Africa, Rwanda, Senegal, Germany and France, and their partners, s work to increase local vaccine production and improve global and regional collaboration to prevent and respond to future pandemics.

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