Are there enough factories to make the jab?
THE Government has placed orders for more than 340 million doses of vaccine from seven manufacturers, including Pfizer. To put this in context, at least 15 million flu jabs are given in the UK each year.
Globally, more than 15 billion doses of Covid vaccine will be needed if everyone is to get the two shots most firms think necessary. This is 15 times the number of jabs of any sort t hat GSK, t he world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, makes annually.
The quantities required are so vast that Covid vaccine production, including at Pfizer, began even before scientists know they will work.
Mass production of the jab being developed by Oxford University with pharma company AstraZeneca began in April, for example (final trial results are expected before the year end).
‘Normally, full-scale manufacturing wouldn’t start until... you know the vaccine works,’ says Professor Nilay Shah, head of chemical engineering at Imperial College London and an author of a Royal Society report on the practicalities of making and distributing a Covid vaccine. ‘Otherwise you are spending an enormous amount producing vaccines when there is a good chance you will just have to throw them away.’
The various jabs are also being made in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, U.S. and India.
Production is limited here as, ‘while other countries invested i n production, the British government focused its funding on vaccine research’, says research scientist and ex-Pfizer executi ve Professor Mike Wyllie.
GSK, which has several Covid vaccines in development, has sites in the UK, Europe, Canada and the U.S. Some vaccines are being made at factories used to make other jabs, others at plants producing drugs, including cancer therapies, and some at new sites.
But lack of capacity has sped up the building of new UK facilities. These include the £200million Vaccines Manufacturing Innovation Centre in Oxfordshire, which should be able to produce 70 million doses of coronavirus vaccine — enough for one shot for everyone in the UK — within four to six months of its summer 2021 opening.
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