 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. In today's episode of Talking Science Tech, we are joined by Prabhi Prakash to discuss how the current landscape of the COVID-19 vaccine is looking. So as we know the Pfizer vaccine has now become the first one to be approved. It has been approved by the UK and it is set to roll out soon. So Prabhi, can you first start by telling us a bit about this vaccine and the other vaccine candidates which are there which right now look the most promising. Okay, if we look at what the vaccines which are already showing some signs of having proven successful, there's all of this with lots of caveats because they early days yet they are preliminary results. They are not findings which have been submitted to a peer reviewed group but they are really press releases. So what we are banking ourselves on are these press releases of the manufacturers and secondly despite these numbers on the basis of which these figures are being quoted are also not very large. So as the trials unfold as more figures come in, we will be in a better position to see really what the efficacy levels are. So four vaccines have given their preliminary findings. One is of course the much doubted for BioNTech Pfizer vaccine. It is a BioNTech development which Pfizer is front-ending because it has the financial cloud to do so. BioNTech is a German company. Pfizer is an American ultranational one of the bigger ones in terms of revenue. Then we have the modern vaccine which has never successfully brought a vaccine to the market as yet but using a new technology which also is a BioNTech path also a new technology which is what is called the messenger RNA based vaccines and they also have claimed over 90% success. I am not going to say 94, 92, 95 these are all such small numbers those figures do not make much sense. And then with the Gamalaya vaccine we have also based on again small numbers shown that they have above 90% efficacy. Now efficacy is the issue is that when you have a number of people you have put in the vaccine trials that you look at over the period of time the two arms one the place of arm and one is the actually the virus in arm in which we have given some kind of either inactivated virus some messenger RNA which produces antibodies produces actually virus components which then produce the antibodies all of this if we take into account then what you see is that the ratio of the people who get infected later in the place of arm against the people who are in the vaccine arm if there is a significant difference those are the figures we are talking about and therefore 95 percent 90 percent really refer to that. Then we have the AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine which has set 70 percent in one arm of the trial it was 90 percent other arm was 62 percent and then they have averaged based on the numbers of people in each of the trials and they've got a figure of 70 percent. Now as we know the AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine this is the mistake this arm which showed 90 percent actually had the first dose which is half dose and that was a mistake and later on therefore they separated it and made it two trials and interestingly interestingly enough the one which had the mistake was found to be more successful against small numbers so if we have larger numbers maybe they'll average it out and we'll see all those similar figures so we have to wait and watch that and the of the Gamalaya vaccine as well as we said that also has claimed a good success so we have four vaccines on the table and two of them have already received emergency usage clearance one of it by UK probably the US and the European Union authorities will also follow and the Gamalaya vaccines by the Russians who have also had an emergency emergency usage policy for some time now and they got that earlier and then we have the Chinese vaccines also which are in late trials again on phase three trials and the preliminary results should be out very soon they have also permitted emergency usage particularly for those who are going on is keeping operations outside the country so they are essentially not a part of the double blind trial but they're a part of also the larger experiment of vaccinating people and seeing whether they get COVID-19 or not so this is the roughly the scenario now there are a good number of vaccines now on phase three trials so it's not these are the only ones and some of them are in fairly advanced form like the Chinese couple of the Chinese vaccines so we expect every week now or every two weeks we will probably start seeing more results of the vaccines under phase three trials and then there is another lot of 25-30 vaccines which are in the phase one phase two trials which will also then gravitate and graduate into the phase three trials at least some of them so we are likely to see about maybe 10-12 vaccines make the cut and because there are a large number of countries because a lot of the countries are not going to depend on external suppliers so countries like the US like European Union like UK like India as well as like Russia and China they are going to produce their own vaccines this is clear they're not going to depend on others Indian case though we have vaccines which have also under trials but we also have access because we have very large vaccine manufacturing capacity so we are also licensing Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine Novavax vaccine which is not yet in phase three trials in the United States or at least the results are not out so we have more access to this and also we have Indian companies have signed up with Russian vaccine manufacturers if we take the whole scenario yes we are likely to see vaccines but the picture is not that good when we try and see who is going to get access to these vaccines which countries are well placed to get access or are already blocking the vaccines and which countries are not so what we see a good good picture scientifically this is the fastest vaccine development ever and we have also seen a very large number of companies laboratories who have worked together to develop a number of vaccines so the science and the technology part of it the production technology is still on hold in the sense that we'll find out how that is going to go that is it seems has passed the COVID-19 test whether we will pass the equity test the public health test and the challenge of delivering the vaccine to the people this is what we have to see now and as I said with vaccine nationalism running amok we really have a scenario which is very much skewed against poorer countries and the global poor yes so as you're saying that countries are basically we see that of all these leading candidates most of their doses have been bought up by or they've already been booked by the by the few rich countries which is just for about i think 13 percent of the world's population and the lower middle lower income countries and middle income countries are being left behind so then how when do we think uh when do you think is the vaccine going to reach these the people in these countries if we look let's look at quickly about how these countries which are grabbing the bulk of the lion's share of the vaccines who are they so rich countries with 13 percent of the world's population and that's basically the united states the united kingdom the european union japan australia canada this is really a handful of countries and as i said they represent only 13 percent of the world's population have at the moment out of the possible total production capacity which is going to be there in 2021 they probably have more than 50 percent probably close to 55 to 60 percent of the vaccine production either bought or blocked so this is the status that is there so rest 30 45 40 percent is going to be divvied up with the 87 percent of the population so that is the scale of the mismatch in this countries like india and brazil which have indigenous vaccine manufacturing incapacity are certainly better placed particularly india because you're the largest generic vaccine manufacturer in the world in fact the largest vaccine manufacturer in the world in sedum institute punay so india is in that sense luckier than others and also we have cadillas uh cadillas idus cadilla we have reddish laboratory we have barred biotech we have also other biologic manufacturers who can manufacture vaccines as well so there are a number of contracts being reached among the vaccine developers and the vaccine manufacturers who have facilities in india so this makes india better placed so it is true that india probably has some ability to leverage a large amount of vaccines for itself not on the scale which the rich countries have canada i think has five times the number of vaccines it requires for vaccinating its people so while we don't have that amount of extra vaccines but probably we'll be able to vaccinate a large number of the population we have to see what the total numbers are there are figures hanging around like 1.6 billion have been blocked by india we don't know the veracity of these figures but it is true that sedum institute which is planning to manufacture two billion vaccine doses one billion of astrazeneca oxford vaccine and other is now a wax of the united states that at least a part of that maybe 50% of that may be reserved for india so that's the indian advantage but as i said we have other manufacturers too and gamalia has also reached some agreement with manufacturers to have 300 million vaccines produced in india how much for india we don't know and reddish laboratory is importing 100 million from them so these are all the figures in india has but when it comes to the the poorest country the poorer countries those who have been economically poorer countries they seem to be completely left out in the core their only hope is what is called the covax platform which has been set up by various vaccine alliances in which uh who is also participating there are about 100 odd countries who are participating what is not happening is the money they require if you want to supply the vaccine to the poorer countries and covax facility that's the one we are talking about is only supplying 20% of the population populations vaccines in the what would be called the ldcs these developed countries and also if other countries want to participate they will also get vaccines for at cost so this amount that they require for vaccinating the poorer countries or the least developed economies that is to just to do 20% of that the amount they require is 2 billion what they've got is only 800 billion till date so they are really in no position to provide vaccines therefore to bulk of the least developed countries now the least developed countries are also having agreements for instance with chinese manufacturers and with russian manufacturers that in lieu of running vaccine trials in their countries that they should i get access to the vaccines particularly for the chinese because having crushed the virus in their country they don't have patients now for clinical trials they need to go outside and do the clinical trials they're doing some in bangladesh some in brazil in spite of the opposition of president bolson are out there then they're doing it in west asia so they have they're doing a large number of drug trials abroad and in lieu of that they have promised them the vaccine supplies china has also agreed to participate in the covax facility of who gavi sefi the vaccine alliance what they will do will it be through supplies will it be through money we don't know so at the moment the chances of anything beyond a small section of the people in the global south the poorest countries the least economically developed countries that is unlikely and related to this is of course the aspect of intellectual property rights how those have been a barrier throughout this pandemic in terms of in terms of distribution of a sufficient amount of medicines um and other sorts of equipments have other kinds like countries have not been able to get these because of these intellectual property rights so when throughout this pandemic we see that the right the people are not being given access because of this so we can probably expect something similar to happen in case of the vaccine as well well let's look at this issue slightly differently one is the patent protected drugs which were supposed to provide some efficacy the remdesivir being the main one touted there were also some of the biologics which were talked about which are anti-arthritic drugs which they thought they could repurpose all of them really failed or the interferon for instance all of them really fail that did not show significant efficacy not at least in the most serious cases or those who are under oxygen support it only it seems it only helps during the early phases and at that time people do not get access to this kind of drugs very easy so what happened therefore is the only drugs which really worked was the dexamethasone corticosteroids and that's being provided and because it's very cheap drug so that's been provided and unfortunately that has not reached the issue of patents or any of this kind of problems that we are talking about what has happened is the patent works for instance even now and even if it is not patents it's basically other forms of intellectual property which could be what are called trade secrets there could be designs there's a whole bunch of intellectual property protection which is not patent protection and those come in the way for diagnostics for instance we have the tests that are being done PCR a tests are the PCR a test so a lot of the diagnostics which are not the main technology may not be patent protected but diagnostic other aids reagents a lot of those things can come up different kinds of intellectual property regime and when it comes to vaccines the issue is even more the issue is that it is not the patent that protects the vaccine alone but the fact how do you manufacture the manufacturing technology if it's a closely guarded secret or it is something which is put as a trade secret so those kind of things then become a barrier so there has been an application that all of these intellectual property and there's a list of them which India and South Africa have moved the Trips Council on WTO that these should be made free from intellectual property restrictions and should be widely shared you see the issue is not the legal part alone but companies who hold these technologies must be willing to share them with countries because it's a pandemic and they owe it to the world that they should in this juncture not think of profits recovering their costs yet but not profits and that should be the approach unfortunately when it comes to a Pfizer or it comes to a Moderna they are very clear they said we have nothing to do with anything else except for profit purpose which we have built these vaccines for so it's to make profits yes we've got public funds but our idea is that we should also be provide enough money for our investors so investors become the major driving force why they're doing or selling the vaccines so this is the for profit motive of big capital in pharmaceuticals that is the one which prevents manufacturing being distributed across the globe otherwise vaccine manufacture if the basic technology is shared is not that such a difficult exercise in fact China has a huge number of small enterprises who make vaccines unlike India which we have a few big vaccine manufacturers they have actually small and medium scale industries which may make a very large amount of vaccines so it is possible to scale down or scale up the vaccine manufacturing technology provided that is shared and that is available widely so that is where the problem comes AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine seems to have accepted that at least in this period of the epidemic they won't make super profits this is after all developed public money Oxford University and therefore this would be at least try to be sold not at cost but at minimal profit so there is that approach that they are showing but what the other companies will do we don't know thank you for being for talking to us today on this issue that's all the time we have keep watching this clip