International race for Covid-19 vaccine accelerates

The U.S., China, and Russia see the development and sale of a Covid-19 vaccine as a potential source of political and economic benefits. Their rivalry and reluctance to join multilateral initiatives are hindering WHO’s efforts to ensure equal access to the vaccine for all countries, including developing ones. This may delay containment of the pandemic and lead to recurrence.

According to WHO, there are more than 191 studies on a Covid-19 vaccine worldwide, 40 of which are in clinical trials. Research entities from China, Russia, the U.S., and the UK are the most advanced in the research—the third stage, which, if successfully completed, clears the drug to be introduced to the market.

Russia, where the burden of research has been taken on by state institutes, was the first in the world to register a vaccine against COVID-19 (on 11 August). It plans to distribute the vaccine inside the country starting at the turn of October to November and then export it from early 2021.

Almost a third of the companies and institutes around the world whose work is in the clinical trial phase, and as many as four of the nine research consortia that have passed to the third stage of research, come from China. American and British intelligence services have accused Russian and Chinese hackers of stealing data from Western companies, but it is difficult to determine to what extent it actually allowed them to speed up work. Also in the third phase are vaccines by four American corporations (one of them, Pfizer, cooperates with the German BioNTech and the Chinese Fosun Pharma) and the research project of the AstraZeneca consortium and the University of Oxford (UK).

(WBJ)