COVID-19 Research & Analysis | Knowledge Portal

COVID-19 VACCINE RESEARCH & ANALYSIS

Since the beginning of 2021, the Global Health Centre has been collecting and publishing data on COVID-19 vaccine R&D investments, manufacturing, purchases and donations. This will be the final update of this website. When we first began collecting this data few other such resources existed, a situation that has fortunately now changed considerably.

The objective of this exercise has been three-fold: first, to shed light on who funds, develops and manufactures COVID-19 vaccines and the implications for equitable access to them. Second, to support stakeholders to track and understand the global situation of Covid-19 vaccine innovation, production and access, with an eye towards also informing policies for access to medical countermeasures in the future. And third, to shed light on various approaches to pandemic R&D, and its implications for pharmaceutical R&D more broadly.

In addition to gathering data from traditional sources, we also incorporated novel techniques to collect data, using algorithms to collect data from social media in an effort to keep up with the growing complexity and diversity of vaccine donations and purchases. We have made our work available (both the data and the code used for data collection) open access through a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial International license for others to also analyse and contribute.

For data on Covid-19 R&D investments, see Policy Cures Research’s COVID-19 R&D investment tracker (with data available from January to October 2020), Duke University’s Launch & Scale Speedometer provides very useful data and analysis on vaccine purchases, donations and manufacturing agreements. Finally, UNICEF’s COVID-19 Vaccine Market Dashboard also provides important data on vaccine approvals, pricing, agreements and deliveries.

LATEST UPDATE (FEBRUARY 2022)

We summarize here the main changes we have observed in our data collection since the last update on 16 December 2021. Since December 2021, COVAX has significantly accelerated its vaccine delivery and reached the milestone of delivering 1 billion doses on 15 January, 2022. Despite this, vaccine access continued to be limited for LMICs. Our database update this month shows new purchases by several high income countries including the EU, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland and the UK, which include the option of accessing variant-adapted vaccines. At the same time, a new report showed that high income countries received more doses towards the end of 2021, than the total doses delivered to African countries throughout the year. Novavax became the 9th vaccine against COVID-19 to receive WHO’s emergency use authorisation, as first exports also began to Indonesia.

> For an updated analysis and full dataset on vaccine purchases, visit our ‘COVID-19 Vaccine Access’ page.

Vaccine donations and deliveries have progressed at different rates depending on the donor country. While Germany donated 100m doses in 2021, Australia had distributed only about 15% of its committed doses. Media reports have continued to highlight that recipient countries are unable to use donated doses, including an instance where Nigeria reportedly had to destroy 1m of soon-to-expire donated doses in December 2021. Even so, donations remain the main form of vaccine support, and new pledges and deliveries were announced. China pledged to donate 600m doses to African countries. Brazil and Israel also committed to donating vaccines, while Cuba and Taiwan started donations of their locally developed vaccines to other countries.

> Further details and the dataset on donations are available on our ‘COVID-19 Vaccine Access’ page.

In a boost to local production, the WHO’s technology transfer hub in South Africa made significant progress in replicating Modena’s mRNA vaccine, without the vaccine developer’s involvement. Johnson & Johnson and Aspen Pharmacare of South Africa signed a licensing agreement making Aspen the first African company with the rights to distribute and price the vaccine. Baylor College of Medicine also licensed its patent-free COVID-19 vaccine to Bangladesh’s manufacturer Incepta Vaccine Ltd. while Nepal initiated talks for local manufacturing of Gamaleya’s vaccine.

> An analysis and the complete dataset on the manufacturing landscape can be found on our ‘COVID-19 Vaccine Manufacturing’ page.