 Hello and welcome to Newsclick. In today's episode of Talking Science and Tech, we're joined by Prabhupada Koyasta, who is going to address the question of why we aren't able to ramp up the production of vaccines against COVID-19 in order to meet the needs of the world's population of 7 billion people, 7.7 billion people. So he's going to talk about what are the logistical challenges, what are the technical challenges, and in today's current political climate, what are the challenges in the form of copyright laws and patent laws which are standing in the way of increasing production. You know, I think the issues that are really vexing all of us is why can't we ramp up the production of the vaccines, the distribution, getting into the arms of the people is of course a separate logistical question. But the key bottleneck, it seems to be at the moment the production of the vaccine itself. If you look at what's happening in the world, the WHO director generalist called it grotesque, that while we are trying to vaccinate the entire population of the United States, Africa has received only about 8 million doses of the vaccine. Even out of that, most of it has gone to Morocco, bulk of the African health workers. In fact, most of the African health workers do not have any protection. And under such conditions, they're treating COVID-19 patients and dying. Now, this is why this is being called grotesque, because without even the health workers being vaccinated in different countries, we are facing a disaster on an unimaginable scale for those countries. And particularly, the poorer population of the world or the poorer countries of the world, which do not have the money to block huge quantities of vaccines to X, forex times of their population needs. And that's the real issue. Why is it then we are not able to ramp up production? Logistical issue is a different exercise altogether. When you look at the production issues, then we have to look at what the bottlenecks are. Are the bottlenecks that we don't have enough production facilities in the world? Can that not be ramped up? Or is it something else? And here we come across the key problem that, yes, we have vaccine capacities, capabilities, which can be ramped up. But a lot of that are idling, because those companies which tried to get into the vaccine game did not succeed. Their facilities at the moment are idling. Second set of facilities which are still idling are facilities in countries who do contract vaccine manufacture. And they do not have the technology transfers, agreements, et cetera, which are required for them to start manufacturing these vaccines. Though slowly we are seeing some of the agreements being signed. The third, and that's also an important one, that there is a whole lot of supply chain bottlenecks, also part of it because of the United States policies of using the Korean War law to facilitate its producers of vaccines to have the first dip, so to say, and all the intermediate equipment that is required for vaccine production. That is it. Even companies like AstraZeneca's Licency Serum Institute in India, there is also Biologics E who has also come in and reported that they cannot release ramp up production of Johnson and Johnson vaccine in India, because they also do not have the requisite intermediate components that require bioreactors, plastics, et cetera, et cetera, which are, again, not being so easily available from the United States, because as I said of the defense law that the United States is using to privilege its own vaccine manufacture over all others in the world. So we have a very lopsided scenario. I am not going to get into that in detail today. But let's look at what the vaccine scenario is in terms of manufacture. And let's break it down into three broad groups of vaccine manufacturing that is being attempted. One is, of course, the much hyped BioNTech Pfizer vaccine, which is really developed by BioNTech in Germany. Pfizer has virtually taken it over in terms of the larger production capacities it seems to have. And of course, the distribution in the world being one of the largest vaccine manufacturers in the world also. Then we have the Moderna vaccine. These are two mRNA vaccines that they are called messenger RNA vaccines. And one thing is that it is new. But the other thing about these vaccines is that you can ramp up production pretty quickly. That means you can scale up much more easily because you're producing essentially messenger RNA. And the body is what produces what is called the spike protein itself. So as you know, most vaccine manufacturers have really focused on what is called the spike protein of the corona SARS-CoV-2 virus, because that's the one it attaches to our body cells, the lung cells, the nasal cells, the cells in our upper respiratory upper respiratory tract. And that that that is a spike protein is the one which is used being used in different forms. When you talk about mRNA vaccines or what are called the adenovirus or the subunit protein vaccines. And of course, then we have the whole inactivated vaccines, which you which use the entire virus. So these are the three broad classification of vaccines that are being used. The mRNA vaccine seems we can scale them up much much more quickly. But there are constraints because these are absolutely new vaccines. They were tried earlier with other diseases, but they really never came to fruition, partly because the diseases sort of ended, the epidemics ended, or because there was not enough money to put them into pipeline to see test them out. Now, of course, given that fact that the platform is available, the SARS-CoV-2 virus became an immediate target for them. They could re-engineer the platform for this purpose, and that has succeeded in producing workable vaccines, which are being used widely in the United States and rich countries. They have, of course, a huge drawback because there is also the supply chain, which has to be ultra cold chain. So therefore, it has not been very attractive for us to the world. But the advantage of this vaccine manufacture, it's can be scaled up in terms of the number of vaccine doses it can produce relatively quickly. The bottleneck here is, of course, the technology is not known so well, very few companies have the capability of doing it. And it needs, therefore, transfer of technology to others. Is that difficult? And we'll come to that question later, because there are lots of manufacturers, or what are called biologics, who can re-engineer their processes to manufacture this vaccine, provided the trend know-how is available. So what is the know-how? We'll come to that. The second, of course, of what are called the adenovirus vaccines, which is, as you know, adenovirus is being used as a vector to transfer what is called the spike protein into what is otherwise a benign virus for us. I did some common cold virus or the chimpanzee virus as Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine uses. Therefore, what it does is you produce and take a relatively benign virus, which doesn't affect us much or affect us very little. And then you put the protein manufacturing part into that. So therefore, the vector which you multiply has the ability to produce the protein. And then you inject it into the body, you get the spike protein in the body and therefore the immune reaction from the body and therefore the vaccine. So this is the process which seems, again, to be that you can ramp this up relatively quickly, because what you're producing is the adenovirus. And producing the adenovirus is relatively safe. You can, the fact that it produces the proteins, spike protein within itself also makes the carrier relatively easy. And therefore, this can be scaled up. It seems relatively more quickly. The process is relatively more widely known because these vector virus vaccines have been there for quite some time, seven years, eight years. So there is knowledge about these vaccines. The companies will know how to do it. Therefore, the bottleneck is really transfer of some knowledge, some process know how, and not re-engineering the whole cycle again. Third kind of vaccines required or being used are what is the, for instance, the Bharat biotech vaccine, the co-vaccine or the CanSino-Sinofarm-Sinovac vaccines. I think the Sinovac and Sinofarm vaccines have also inactivated by this. And the CanSino has other vaccines as well. So if you take the largest number of vaccines which are reaching, for instance, Africa or reaching other countries, it has been the Chinese vaccines, Sinovac and Sinofarm vaccines, which more than 100 million doses have been exported to other countries. Unfortunately, the mRNA vaccines have only reached rich countries and nothing else. Of course, we also talked about the constraint in terms of the cold chain there. But nevertheless, even limited cold chain has not been available because not because it's the, that cannot be created, but because at the moment, the focus is entirely on supplying it at a relatively higher cost than other vaccines to only the rich countries and nowhere else. Now, question that you raised or the question that everybody is raising, how many vaccine doses are really required by the world? And when can we get them? So the answer is that probably in the population, the world is 7.7 billion, we are looking at about 16 billion doses to be created, probably more, but at least 16 billion doses to cover the entire population if we do it in 2021. At the moment, we seem to have capacity which can be ramped up to meet at least 12 billion doses. What is the bottleneck? Why aren't we able to do it more quickly? Why aren't we able to see it across the globe in very many countries? Now, one of the issues with vaccines is they have complex molecules. They're not simple molecules. And therefore, though they are not biologicals in the sense being of biological drugs, they're biologicals being complex, big molecules. So therefore, it's not that simple, like making small molecule medicine like paracetamol that we use for our body aches and various other medicines that we normally use. Biologicals are complex. Therefore, there is a problem. Making mRNA and scaling it up, mRNA vaccines and scaling it up is again dealing with first the ability to make essentially large quantities of mRNA, messenger RNAs, which we again make to biological processes. You purify it. You separate it. Then you also have to encapsulate it in what are called fatty globules, lipids as they're called nanoparticles. And all of this is a complex process. So none of it is going to be that simple. And then of course, you have to put it in ampules files in which you can send it to finally for getting into the arms of the people, the jabs. But the whole process is there is nothing that cannot be replicated today if the know-how is shared. The whole argument that has been built that this is something so difficult that only a few companies can do it just is not true because large biological manufacturing companies exist in the world who do contract manufacture. They have the ability to do it provided the know-how is shared. It is not patent. And this must be very clear to people. Patenting is relatively a process where each step of the way today seems to be patent. So you get a large number of patents covering the original invention. It is supposed to be that you can take the patent and recreate it if you want. But that is not the entire information. There's a whole bunch of information which is not given in the patent purposely, because that's not the way to originally design, but which is kept as kept as straight secret as know-how. And that is not shared. It can be re-engineered. Yes, it will take two years, three years for re-engineering. But this is the two, three years we don't have. And that is where the world is asking that we need to share the know-how, how to make this company share the know-how is the issue. And there the United States and the rich countries have said it's in the interest of our nations that this knowledge remains with our pharma companies even if they have been created by publicly funded R&D of our countries. So this knowledge should be privatized, remain private so these companies can make profit. And we can then control which countries they will go to and which countries they will not and we can use it in our vaccine diplomacy is what they say. But I would call it a little harsher than that, the vaccine war that is being waged across the world. And the third part of this is this has led to a scenario where for instance, India is being criticized for having hoarding AstraZeneca's vaccine, the Serum Institute Covishil vaccine, which at the moment because of the Indian numbers rising, the government of India has put some restrictions on its export. Yes, it is true that the world depends on Serum Institute being supplying vaccines to Covax program of WHO. But the point is that what we are seeing from the advanced countries today is the fact their vaccines are restricted to only those countries. They have not supplied any vaccine outside the few rich countries in which they exist as manufacturers. The rest of the global has been supplied essentially by China and by India. The Sinovac vaccines and the Serum Institute vaccines are the only ones which have gone in large quantities. Also, certain other AstraZeneca manufacturers are also supplying vaccines. But the bulk of it has really come from Serum Institute in India. And of course, China, which is supplied till date, largest amount of vaccine doses to the world. All of this came from public domain science in the United States or in Germany, the BioNTech vaccine or in UK, where it came from Oxford University, came from public domain science. But the governments of the rich countries wanted to be the private property of a few drug companies. And that is where the real battle today is the inability of these countries to accept that unless everybody in the globe is vaccinated, the epidemic continues, new variants will arise and we will continue the cycle of the pandemic continuously. So this is the basic technological challenge before us, just as much as it was during AIDS vaccines time. It is not science and technology which is standing in the way or public health policies. It's really the greed of big pharma backed by rich countries that caused a huge number of people to die of AIDS and which today is the single biggest bottleneck of being able to vaccinate the global population.