Category: News

A new effort by the Duke Global Health Innovation Effort strives to map COVID-19 vaccine pre-purchases around the world.

The tool, called the Launch&Scale Speedometer, showed that high-income countries are cultivating deals that leave out low-income countries, hindering efforts for equitable global allocation. The Kaiser Family Foundation reported that based on the report from Duke, high income countries have already purchased 3.8 billion doses of the vaccine, with an option for 5 billion more. People in low-income countries may not be able to access the vaccine until 2024.

At Free the Vaccine for COVID-19, we argue that vaccine nationalism, this process of high-income countries hoarding large supplies of the vaccine, will only prolong the pandemic. Efforts to ensure that the vaccine supply can reach low-income countries are increasingly crucial. The report highlights the importance of global alliances such as COVAX, a WHO effort that would help provide vaccine supplies to a large majority of the world’s population. Make sure to check out more from the tracker here!

Check out the work of our Season 2 Free the Vaccine for COVID-19 participants from Australia in the following video!

Last week, the U.S. government finally released the contract it made with Moderna in August for vaccine manufacturing and distribution. As with most documents of public interest released by this administration, the contract is heavily redacted.

Moderna Therapeutics holds one of the current vaccine candidates that has entered Phase III testing. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had entered a contract with Moderna back in August as part of Operation Warp Speed. The contract with Moderna, worth approximately $1.5 billion USD, would allow for the United States to secure the first 100 million doses of the vaccine, along with an option to buy up to 400 million more doses. These contracts have been created with many pharmaceutical companies despite the fact that data about safety and efficacy has not been finalized yet, as all the clinical trials are still running. The terms and conditions of the contract have not been extensively disclosed, leaving the public in the dark to wonder important details about cost and access. The contract released is 53 pages, only of which 14 are unredacted.

NPR reported that “while the publicly posted Moderna contract includes previously unknown details, extensive redactions leave the public in the dark about some of the company’s obligations as well as the extent of protections for taxpayers.” Keep reading here.

For almost an entire year now, all eyes have been focusing on research to find a safe and effective vaccine for COVID-19. What are these clinical trials really measuring?

Peter Doshi of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) reports that the current Phase III vaccine trials are not inherently designed to prove the two things that an antiviral vaccine is supposed to do. First, it should “reduce the likelihood you will get severely ill and go to the hospital” and secondly, it must “prevent infection and therefore interrupt disease transmission.”

Nevertheless, none of the current Phase III trials are set up to detect reductions in serious outcomes, including the number of hospital admissions, the use or necessity of intensive care, or deaths. The vaccines are also not being studied to see if they can interrupt the transmission of the virus.

So what are the current vaccines really doing? Read more from the BMJ here.

Photos courtesy of Timoteo Murphy!

According to Global Citizen, researchers from the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS) in South Africa have recently launched a trial to test to see if a vaccine given for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) can serve as an effective defense against COVID-19.

While the new effort is not an attempt to hinder current vaccine research, scientists are hoping to use it to protect individuals, like frontline healthcare workers, who have a higher probability of exposure to the vaccine than most.

Countries involved in this research effort include South Africa, Ghana, Uganda, USA, UK, and more. Read more about the vaccine trial here.