Nobel laureate and immunologist Professor Peter Doherty said the world needed to change its funding model for vaccine development.
“There is just not enough profit margin in it for pharma companies," he said. "They live by profits and the rules of capitalism. And capitalism has no interest in human beings other than as consumers.”
Professor Mark Sullivan, managing director of Medicines Development for Global Health, a vaccine development company based in Melbourne, described the vaccine development landscape as a “market failure”.
“The problem is this market failure is our only method of developing medicines,” he said.
The final study needed for a vaccine to be approved is much more expensive than a similar study for a drug because the study needs to be huge to definitively show prevention of a disease – “tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of participants”, said Professor Sullivan. Three SARS vaccine projects, which may have yielded important insights for a COVID-19 vaccine as the viruses are closely related, stalled at this stage.
And manufacturing a vaccine is much more expensive than making a drug because it often involves modifying yeast or bacteria to produce a vaccine – a difficult and costly process.
Because of all those factors, the enthusiasm of the pharmaceutical industry to invest in vaccines has dropped dramatically in the last 20 years.
Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi which works to distribute vaccines to the poor, said it was very difficult to get funding for research on vaccines for viruses that have not yet become pandemics. “We have enough land-based nuclear missiles to destroy the world. And in case that does not work, we keep air-based missiles and submarines. And that’s to prevent something much less likely than the evolutionary certainty that is a pandemic virus.”
"Without immediate additional financial contributions the vaccine programmes we have begun will not be able to progress and ultimately will not deliver the vaccines that the world needs," Dr Richard Hatchett, Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation's CEO, said in a statement.
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