Having a range of Covid-19 vaccines available for people to use around the world will be essential to bringing the pandemic under control. Here’s why.

The preliminary data shared by Pfizer-BioNTech and Sputnik V last week, and Moderna this week, showing their vaccines to be more than 90% effective, has given us all hope that an end to Covid-19 may be in sight.

So why is it important to keep working on and investing in the hundreds of Covid-19 vaccines still in development?

  1. We need a range of vaccines that can work for a range of people.  We need Covid-19 vaccines to work for a diverse range of people – including healthcare workers, older people, and those with underlying health conditions.
  2. We need to produce billions of vaccine doses to protect those most at risk To bring the pandemic under control we will need to produce and roll out vaccines at a scale and speed never seen before. To meet the aim of vaccinating high-risk populations around the world by the end of 2021(opens in a new tab), we need at least 2 billion vaccine doses.
  3. We need vaccines that can reach everyone, everywhere.  We will need to get Covid-19 vaccines to everyone who needs them, wherever they are in the world – from people living in metropolitan areas in the UK, to rural populations in the far reaches of Africa and Asia(opens in a new tab).
  4. We need vaccines that are available to all countries and supported through COVAX To overcome the pandemic, people all around the world must have access to vaccines, treatments and tests. However, many of the vaccines being developed are being bought up by countries making deals directly with pharmaceutical companies for their populations.

We need to see countries, like the UK, with vaccine doses secured in bilateral deals, committing to donate excess doses to COVAX, so that they too can be fairly distributed.

Read the full article about multiple vaccines by Charlie Weller at Wellcome.