-
Americas
-
Asia & Oceania
-
A-I
J-Z
EMEA Thought Leadership
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more -
Middle East & Africa
EMEA Thought Leadership
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
Regions
-
Americas
-
Asia & Oceania
-
Europe
-
Middle East & Africa
-
Americas
-
Asia & Oceania
-
Europe
Europe
- Adriatic
- Belgium
- Bulgaria
- Czech Republic
- Deutschland
- España
- France
- Greece
- Hungary
- Ireland
- Israel
- Italia
EMEA Thought Leadership
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more -
Middle East & Africa
EMEA Thought Leadership
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
Segments
-
Pharmaceutical
-
Consumer Health
-
MedTech
-
Public Health & Government
-
Payer & Provider
Pharmaceutical (Global page)
Bringing data science and human science together to advance human health and support the pharmaceutical industry from clinical trials to commercialization.
Learn More
Consumer Health
Connecting with powerful, evidence-based market insights to drive agile thinking, uncover growth potential, and gain competitive advantage in this fast-moving consumer health market.
LEARN MORE
MedTech
Empowering to orchestrate operations across the entire product lifecycle, from concept-to-market, providing quality control, regulatory, safety and compliance solutions along the way.
Learn more
Public Health & Government
Working across the health system to address key barriers to deliver high-quality, cost-effective care while improving health outcomes using our data-driven and population-centric solutions.
LEARN MORE
Payer & Provider
Delivering a wide range of consulting and technology solutions to support healthcare stakeholders to drive operational efficiency, enhance quality of patient care, and improve systemic outcomes.
learn moreHealthcare Provider Solutions
Solutions
-
Research & Development
-
Real World Evidence
-
Information Insights
-
Market Research
-
Strategy Consulting
-
Contract Sales & Medical Solutions
-
Patient Solutions
-
AI, Digital & Technology Solutions
Research & Development (Global page)
Clinical development enabled by Connected Intelligence™ which combines data and analytics with deep therapeutic and operational expertise to improve efficiency, enhance precision, and bring therapies to patients faster.
Learn More
Real World Evidence
Harness the power of real-world data and insights to demonstrate value-driven evidence and outcomes to meet stakeholder needs across the healthcare ecosystem and to propel healthcare forward.
LEARN MORE
Information Insights
Pharmaceutical market data and information assets that provide actionable data points to help organizations make intelligent connections and drive healthcare forward.
LEARN MORE
Market Research
Primary Intelligence integrates purpose-built and syndicated research solutions with our wide range of data assets, research methodologies, advanced analytics, and deep domain expertise, generating quality insights for our clients.
LEARN MORE
Strategy Consulting
Trusted advisor and partner to global healthcare organisations, solving the most significant business challenges through extensive healthcare expertise.
LEARN MORERelated Solutions
Contract Sales & Medical Solutions (Global page)
Optimize commercial success by leveraging our comprehensive outsourced expertise to accelerate time-to-market.
LEARN MORE
Patient Solutions (Global page)
A single window solution provider to support pharmaco’s design, deploy technology and services that help increase access to medicine and improve treatment adherence.
LEARN MORE
AI, Digital & Technology Solutions
Connected Intelligence™, digital insights, data analytics and advanced technology to power smarter decision-making to enable better patient outcomes and improved business results.
LEARN MOREOur Latest Whitepapers
Get the latest insights on our life sciences, healthcare, and medical technology solutions in Asia Pacific.
Learn MoreBlogs, Case Studies & Podcasts
Explore our library of insights, thought leadership, and the latest topics & trends in healthcare.
Discover Insights
IQVIA APAC Insight
"A curation of IQVIA's best thinking on topics and trends driving change, disruption, and progress in the Asia Pacific healthcare market.
Read The Latest Issue
Featured Event
"Unlocking the Future of Consumer Health: A Special Focus on Senior Consumers
Learn MoreCareer Opportunities
Improving human health requires innovative thinkers who are willing to explore new ideas and build on successes. Unleash your potential with us.
Search Jobs
Blog
Domestic Manufacturing in LMICs Part 1: Lessons Learned with COVID-19
Jun 30, 2023
The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently declared an end to COVID-19 as a public health emergency1. The global pandemic has claimed 7 million lives, but it was estimated that the death toll is much higher, with at least 20 million lives lost. COVID-19 vaccines were the cornerstone for the pandemic recovery when they were first introduced in 2020, yet less than 70% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine2.
Quoting Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General: “COVID-19 has laid bare the searing inequalities of our world, with the poorest and most vulnerable communities the hardest hit, and the last to receive access to vaccines and other tools.” In this blog post, we take a closer look at this huge gap of access to COVID-19 vaccines to draw lessons learned and propose a way forward to prepare countries, and the world, for future pandemic response.
Disparities in vaccines administration: The winners and the losers
By the end of 2022, more than 13 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered globally with approximately (per 100 population):
- 222 doses in high-income countries (HICs)
- 213 doses in upper-middle income countries (UMICs)
- 139 doses in low-middle income countries (LMICs)
- 35 doses in low-income countries (LICs)2
On average, HICs such as the United Kingdom (UK), the United States (US) and Canada, have secured enough vaccine doses to cover more than 300% of its population compared to only 21% for LICs which are heavily dependent on bilateral donations and COVAX3.
Equity challenges extend beyond supply chain disruption
In September 2021, COVAX announced reduction of their initial targets, from delivering 2 billion doses to 1.425 billion doses of vaccines for the year, and from 1.8 billion doses to 1.2 billion doses for 2022, stating challenges such as prioritization of bilateral deals between manufacturers and purchasing countries, export bans, scale-up difficulties by key vaccine producers, and delays in filing for regulatory approval as the main reasons behind the target revision4.
Countries with purchasing power and production capabilities exert their influence on vaccines distribution and prevent from fair access to other parts of the world. The vaccination rates between HICs and UMICs only began to equalize towards the end of August 2021, almost 9 months after the first dose of vaccines were administered2. Even among HICs, there was a huge gap of doses administered within the first 6 months, with the US and UK administering more than twice the number of doses compared to other HICs2.
Figure 1: COVID-19 Vaccine Dose Administered per 100 Population, by Country Income Status
Even when there was an effort to redistribute unused COVID-19 vaccines from HICs to lower income economies, this has been inefficient as it involves multiple logistics handling and tend to be ad-hoc in nature with short expiry vaccines which incurred high wastage rates and country resources to administer multiple types of vaccines received from these donations.
The way forward
As we reflect on these challenges, there is a clear need for us to diversify and expand vaccines manufacturing capabilities especially in LMICs to improve equitable access to resources and global pandemic response.
Currently, manufacturers supplying vaccines and treatments for COVID-19 are largely concentrated in HICs, India and China. The top 10 countries with the highest number of manufacturers for COVID-19 vaccine and treatment are listed in Table 1 below2.
Table 1: Top 10 Countries with Manufacturing Facilities for COVID-19 Vaccine and Treatment
By bolstering local production capabilities, LMICs can reduce reliance on external suppliers, mitigate risks associated with political decisions in these producing countries and ensure timely access to critical resources for pandemic response.
In subsequent blog posts, we will delve deeper into efforts taken to improve domestic manufacturing capabilities in LMICs, as well as its benefits and guiding principles in the context of pandemic response and recovery. Read Part 2: Building Supply Chain Resilience here.
References
1https://www.who.int/news-room/speeches/item/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing---5-may-2023
2Mathieu, E., Ritchie, H., Ortiz-Ospina, E. et al. A global database of COVID-19 vaccinations. Nat Hum Behav (2021) Available from https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
3https://www.unicef.org/supply/covid-19-market-dashboard
4https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/joint-covax-statement-supply-forecast-2021-and-early-2022
IQVIA Public Health & Government
Working across the health system to address key barriers to deliver high-quality, cost-effective care while improving health outcomes using our data-driven and population-centric solutions.