The biotech pioneers Biontech and Moderna dominated the headlines with their vaccines. These drugs will probably mainly go to the rich industrialized countries. The hope of poorer countries in particular rests much more on Astrazeneca and Oxford University.
At first glance, the effectiveness of the third corona vaccine, which has now completed clinical testing, seems to lag a little behind the first two active ingredients. For the global overcoming of the pandemic, AZD1222 from the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company Astrazeneca is likely to play a greater role than the vaccines from competitors Biontech, Pfizer and Moderna.
According to data from the healthcare industry consultancy Airfinity, orders for 3.2 billion doses of the Astrazeneca vaccine have already been placed. The vast majority of these are ordered for countries outside Europe and North America. Pfizer and Biontech have orders for approximately 1.1 billion cans and Moderna for 777 million. Most of these orders come from European countries and the USA. All companies are still in negotiations with states and international organizations for additional deliveries.
The division of markets and the different orders of magnitude are explained by the fundamentally different approach to vaccine development and manufacture. The German startup Biontech, which has teamed up with the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer for the corona vaccine, and the US competitor Moderna are working with a new biotechnical process that has never been brought to market before. As far as is known so far, the prices are said to be between 20 and 40 dollars per vaccine dose.
"These prices carry the risk that the vaccines remain inaccessible to a large part of humanity," warns the health expert for the human rights organization Human Rights Watch Margaret Wurth to Bloomberg. According to the contracts known so far, deliveries of these high-tech vaccines should go mainly to the rich industrialized countries of Europe and the USA, at least in the first few months.
Astrazeneca, on the other hand, developed AZD1222 together with Oxford University on the basis of vector technology, using a common flu vaccine as the basis. This brings great economic and logistical advantages. So factories of pharmaceutical companies all over the world can be used for production. The largest vaccine manufacturer in the world, the Serum Institute of India, has even started production in India. More than 100 million cans should be ready by this year. AZD1222 is also to be produced in Brazil.
Depending on the place of production, the drug should be sold between three and nine dollars per dose. Astrazeneca has committed to dispose of the vaccine at cost for the duration of the global emergency. Astrazeneca wants to hand over part of its production to Covax, an initiative of the World Health Organization and the Gavi vaccination alliance, among others, which is supposed to ensure that poorer countries are supplied with corona vaccines. Covax has now collected around two billion dollars from international donors. Moderna and Pfizer are also negotiating with the initiative, which, according to their own statements, needs at least five billion dollars to buy enough vaccines for the coming year alone.
In contrast to the vaccines from Pfizer, its partners Biontech and Moderna, the Astrazeneca product does not require extreme cooling either. Storage, transport and distribution by the million at minus 70 degrees are a challenge even for highly developed industrialized countries. Many poorer countries, which lack the infrastructure for this, also rely on products such as AZD1222, which can be stored at refrigerator temperature.
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