A new hurdle for vaccine development

Unless countries that have purchased vaccine doses and companies that have already brought vaccines into use agree to find ways to resolve the problem, manufacturers that trail the first wave of producers may not be able to prove that their vaccines work. Not only will that slow efforts to vaccinate the planet, it will block development of next-generation vaccines, and it will stymie efforts to answer key public health questions, like whether boosting with a different vaccine would generate better protection, or whether giving smaller — fractional — doses could protect more people more quickly…

The problem stems in part from the fact that at this point in the pandemic, it isn’t considered ethical to test new vaccines against placebos; instead they would have to be tested against one of the existing shots. But getting one’s hands on licensed or authorized vaccines for study purposes is nigh on impossible; all available doses have been snapped up by countries keen to vaccinate as many of their citizens as possible.

Contracts for those doses contain rigid stipulations about how the vaccines can be deployed. The doses often have to be used in the country that made the purchase; when the Biden administration wanted to share AstraZeneca doses with Canada and Mexico in March, it loaned the doses to get around the restrictions. Contracts also often stipulate that doses that have been purchased must be used for outbreak control, not for research purposes, Lurie said.

Here is the full story by Helen Branswell.  Obviously there is a market-oriented solution here, if only we care enough to implement it…