Measuring the global capacity to produce key materials for vaccine production would help industry and policy makers plan production and encourage scale up of future bottlenecks ahead of time. Production of COVID-19 vaccines moved from one bottleneck to the next-from fears of glass vial shortages to shortages of single use bio-reactor bags. It identifies problem input shortages ahead of time. Estimates of manufacturer’s order books combined with precise estimates of manufacturing capacity can help create more robust scenarios of delivery schedules. Planning for vaccine procurement and deployment would be easier with more reliable estimate of manufacturing capacity. It supports adequate planning for procurement and vaccine delivery. International procurement organizations, such as COVAX, and low- and middle-income country governments are still not clear on when vaccines will be delivered to them. Why is tracking global vaccine manufacturing capacity so crucial?Įstimating global manufacturing capacity provides several important benefits:
To what extent are these caused by production problems, procurement issues, or export bans is not easy to discern. With COVAX recently cutting its supply projections, it’s clear that there are very real problems with vaccine supply chains. Manufacturing capacity increased greatly since the first COVID-19 vaccines were approved in December 2020, but our estimates of how much it increased by, or how much the capacity currently is, are based largely on collating public media announcements. An example of this is India, where the government overestimated the number of vaccines that the country could produce (and production capacity estimates still remain unclear). Multiple groups (Castillo et al, Wouters et al, AirFinity, Reed and Agarwal) have provided and utilized different capacity estimates-sometimes suggesting there is sufficient manufacturing capacity, sometimes alerting there is a wide shortfall.Įstimates of vaccine production are not just inadequate on a global level, but nationally too, where governments didn’t have a good understanding of the capacity available within their jurisdiction. Eighteen months later, there are still no accurate estimates of the currently installed capacity, nor do we know much about the future capacity to produce COVID-19 vaccines. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the world didn’t know the global vaccine and biologics manufacturing capacity with much precision.
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