From a short interview with the CEO of the Serum Institute of India, which manufactures AstraZeneca, quoted because it involves funding by the Gates Foundation and manufacturing vaccine months before they expected it would be approved. Some excerpts:
What has scaling up involved, practically speaking?
We committed ourselves to Covid-19 in March. We took a huge risk, because nobody knew then that any vaccine was going to work. Of the $800m (£579m) we needed, we put in $270m and the rest we raised from the Gates Foundation and various countries. We dedicated about 1,000 employees to the programme and deferred all product launches planned for 2020 for two to three years, so that we could requisition the facilities allocated to them. Then it was a question of equipping those facilities and getting them validated for use, which we did in record time. By August we were manufacturing and stockpiling a vaccine that we predicted, correctly, would be approved around December.
If the vaccines need to be adjusted to protect against future emerging variants, how much of a challenge will that be?
It would be simple now that the processes are up and running. We grow the virus in living cells, so we would simply change the master clone – the virus with which we infect those cells – and that then propagates through them. It would take us two to three months to start producing the new vaccine at capacity.
Reiterating a Zvi point:
What I find really disappointing, what has added a few months to vaccine delivery – not just ours – is the lack of global regulatory harmonisation. Over the last seven months, while I’ve been busy making vaccines, what have the US, UK and European regulators been doing? How hard would it have been to get together with the World Health Organization and agree that if a vaccine is approved in the half-dozen or so major manufacturing countries, it is approved to send anywhere on the planet?
Instead we have a patchwork of approvals and I have 70m doses that I can’t ship because they have been purchased but not approved. They have a shelf life of six months; these expire in April.
From a short interview with the CEO of the Serum Institute of India, which manufactures AstraZeneca, quoted because it involves funding by the Gates Foundation and manufacturing vaccine months before they expected it would be approved. Some excerpts:
Reiterating a Zvi point: