Drugmakers told to share vaccine manufacturing intelligence amid AstraZeneca and EU dispute

The ongoing vaccine supply dispute between AstraZeneca and the European Union has reaffirmed the need to share manufacturing intelligence between drugmakers, health campaigners have said.

A number of charities and health groups have demanded that pharmaceutical companies “give up their monopolies” and distribute information on how their Covid-19 vaccines are produced, enabling other firms across the world to begin manufacturing doses.

The European Commission is pushing AstraZeneca to reroute supplies from its plants in Oxford and Keele, after the pharmaceutical giant announced its EU deliveries will be cut from 80 million to 31 million doses because of production problems in a factory in Belgium.

But the company insists that its contract with the UK gives the British government first claim on any vaccines produced in the country.

In response, the EU has warned it may tighten exports of vaccines produced by its member states, such as the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, and has said it will "take any action required to protect its citizens”.

Facing a shortage of supplies of the Oxford vaccine, the EU is lagging far behind the UK in vaccinating its 450 million people.

Although Downing Street has indicated that doses produced in the UK could be sent to Europe in the coming months, the dispute has been condemned as an example of vaccine nationalism, with health campaigners calling for the immediate suspension of all intellectual property.

“Sadly, this is what happens when we allow pharmaceutical companies to keep their monopolies during a global pandemic,”  Heidi Chow, a senior policy manager at Global Justice Now, told The Independent. “We end up relying on just one company that controls the supplies we all depend on.

“Instead, governments should support the suspension of intellectual property rules during this crisis and get companies to share their technological know-how. 

“Only by taking these steps, will we be able to mobilise as many manufacturers as possible to produce the mass supplies that every country needs.”

In the face of rising pressure, there has been some level of cooperation between companies within the pharmaceutical sector.

On Wednesday, Sanofi said it will fill and pack millions of doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine from July in a rare collaboration to accelerate vaccination efforts.

The French drugmaker will give BioNTech access to a production facility in Frankfurt, which will start to deliver doses this summer. The deal will produce more than 125 million doses of the messenger RNA vaccine for the EU.

Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech are, like other vaccine manufacturers such as AstraZeneca, struggling to meet the unprecedented global demand.  

Ellen ’t Hoen, an expert in medicines policy and researcher at the University Medical Centre Groningen, said the AstraZeneca case demonstrated “that the world needs a better plan for increasing the production of the new Covid-19 vaccines”.

She told The Independent: “Sharing of know-how, intellectual property and technology should be part of that. So should a plan to distribute the vaccines equitably so vulnerable people and health care workers, wherever they live on the planet, are first in line.”

STOPAIDS, a network of UK agencies working together to treat HIV and Aids, warned against the dangerous of vaccine nationalism and rationing, at a time when other countries in the world have yet to receive a single Covid-19 vaccine dose.

“We don’t need to have a trade off on who should be getting the vaccine first,” Saoirse Fitzpatrick, an advocacy manager for the network, told The Independent.

She said the abandonment of monopolies and sharing of production know-how will “not only speed up and maximise manufacturing capacity; it will also make products more affordable by enabling generic competition to help drive down prices”.

Despite the encouraging progress made by a number of developed countries in vaccinating their populations, including Israel, the UK and the US, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said more needed to be done to deliver doses to the lower-income nations of the “global south”.

Earlier this month, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the world is on the edge of a “catastrophic moral failure”, with just 25 doses administered across all poor countries compared with 39 million in wealthier ones.

Dr Ghebreyesus said it was not fair for younger, healthy people in richer nations to get injections before vulnerable people in poorer states.

“We must also remember that we are in a privileged situation in Europe, vaccines are being rolled out to our at risk groups whilst the same groups in lower income countries are likely to be left unprotected this year,” Ms Fitzpatrick added.

Meanwhile, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) is expected to clear the Oxford vaccine for use in the EU on Friday. It would be the third approved in the bloc, after the BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna jabs.

Despite this, a draft recommendation issued by Germany's vaccination advisory committee, an independent panel advising the government, said the jab should only be offered to under-65s for now due to a lack of available data on its effectiveness in the elderly.

 AstraZeneca said that "the latest analyses of clinical trial data for the AstraZeneca/Oxford Covid-19 vaccine support efficacy in the over 65 years age group." It added that it awaits the EMA's decision.

The company noted earlier this week that British regulators supported its use in the older age group. It pointed to earlier-stage data published in the Lancet in November "demonstrating that older adults showed strong immune responses to the vaccine, with 100 per cent of older adults generating spike-specific antibodies after the second dose."

As of 27 January, 7.4 million people in the UK had received a first vaccine dose, including almost four in five of over-80s.