Moderna to Deliver Vaccines to Hard-Hit Developing World
03 Mai 2021 - 12:48PM
Dow Jones News
By Bojan Pancevski
Moderna Inc. said Monday that it will supply 34 million doses of
its Covid-19 vaccine to an international program that distributes
free shots to poorer countries.
The doses will be delivered in the fourth quarter of 2021 to the
World Health Organization-backed Covax initiative, a program
financed mostly by Western governments that offers free coronavirus
vaccines to 92 low- and middle-income countries across the
world.
Covax will retain an option to purchase another 466 million
doses in 2022, according to a statement by Moderna and Gavi, one of
the organizations behind the vaccine aid program.
The announcement comes as the pandemic is accelerating in
developing countries such as India and Brazil, which have been
reporting record numbers of deaths amid a surge of coronavirus
infections that has overwhelmed their healthcare systems.
While countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and Israel are coming
closer to vaccinating large majorities of their populations,
developing nations are struggling to get their rollouts off the
ground, with vaccine manufacturers focused on richer markets who
have preordered the bulk of their supply.
On current trends, emerging economies will have only vaccinated
30% of their populations by the end of the year, the investment
bank UBS said last month.
"We recognize that many countries have limited resources to
access Covid-19 vaccines," said Stephane Bancel, chief executive of
Moderna, in a statement on Monday.
"We support COVAX's mission to ensure broad, affordable and
equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines," Mr. Bancel added
Until last week, Covax had only provided about 50 million doses
out of its goal of delivering two billion doses by the end of this
year, enough to vaccinate around 20% of the receiving countries'
populations with a two-shot regimen. Covax said earlier this year
that it expects to ship 145 million vaccines by the end of May.
Gavi said last month that it had agreements to get 340 million
doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca PLC vaccine and about 1.2 million
doses of shots made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE.
Moderna, like Pfizer-BioNTech, supplies a vaccine based on the
so called messenger RNA technology.
"We are very pleased to sign this new agreement with Moderna,
giving COVAX Facility participants access to yet another highly
efficacious vaccine," Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, said in a
statement.
WHO issued last week an emergency-use authorization for
Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine for people aged 18 and older.
Write to Bojan Pancevski at Bojan.Pancevski@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 03, 2021 06:33 ET (10:33 GMT)
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