The world has a unique opportunity: Accelerating technology transfer and vaccine production through partnerships

The global roll-out of vaccines is crucial to defeating the pandemic, but the lack of technical know-how and manufacturing infrastructure for production are constraining the speedy provision of vaccines globally. This will remain true even if the intellectual property rights of COVID-19 vaccines are waived temporarily. To accelerate technology transfer and global vaccine production, this article calls for the promotion of joint ventures between global COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers and local pharmaceutical companies so as to create regional manufacturing hubs. These joint ventures must be supported financially by global North countries, international organisations, and host-country governments. This approach will incentivize pharmaceutical companies to share not only their patents but also tacit production knowledge because the risk and cost of setting up new facilities will be shared. In this paper, we show how the joint venture approach will have benefits for all the actors involve and generate positive impact on Sub-Saharan Africa and other regions over the long run. Following these policy proposals will not only help protect the global community from COVID-19 but will also present a rare window of opportunity to stimulate the life science industry in the global South, supporting sustainable economic and technological development.

Hindsight is 2020? Lessons in global health governance one year into the pandemic.

Fourteen months into the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we identify key lessons in the global and national responses to the pandemic. The World Health Organization has played a pivotal technical, normative and coordinating role, but has been constrained by its lack of authority over sovereign member states. Many governments also mistakenly attempted to manage COVID-19 like influenza, resulting in repeated lockdowns, high excess morbidity and mortality, and poor economic recovery. Despite the incredible speed of the development and approval of effective and safe vaccines, the emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 variants means that all countries will have to rely on a globally coordinated public health effort for several years to defeat this pandemic.