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Asian countries that took the path of controlling Covid-19 last year have been delayed in their fight against the virus, as efforts to vaccinate their populations lag behind other parts of the world.
Implementation problems vary from country to country, but in most of Asia one factor is constant: lack of vaccines to administer. When vaccines are not developed or produced at home, many Asian countries have to wait for delivery from Europe or the US, leaving them at the back of the queue.
While Asia has become the world’s largest factory, becoming a major part of the global economy, the vaccine race has shown that it lags behind in the pharmaceutical industry.
In between advanced economies, Japan, South Korea and Australia are the fighters: Japan has only given 6.3 doses per 100 people, compared to 90 in the UK. In large developing economies such as Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, inoculation campaigns have hardly begun.
India has a large capacity to manufacture vaccines, but has only administered 14 injections per 100 people and is subject to a devastating outbreak of Covid-19. China, which had the virus and created its vaccines, has also given only 36 doses per 100 people.
Scientists and industry analysts pointed out a number of reasons Asia has fought. The region’s success in controlling Covid-19 has put less political pressure on vaccines. Fewer patients have resulted in slow results in clinical trials. And there is no global pharmaceutical company in Asia that is able to register patients from all over the world.
“There is no equivalent of Pfizer in Asia,” said Ken Ishii, a professor of vaccine science at the University of Tokyo.
Outbreaks of Sars, Mers and bird flu have been well-prepared by Asian public health systems in recent decades, but this has had a negative impact on vaccines. China began to take vaccine development seriously after the Sars, but Japan spent billions of yen in a factory to get the flu shots – the wrong technology for Covid-19.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the Asian vaccine is the struggle in India. It’s there Indian Serum Institute, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, produces around 60m-70m doses of the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine per month.
Vaccination campaigns have hardly started in large developing economies, such as Thailand © Narong Sangnak / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock
India also has the capacity to develop its own vaccines. Bharat Biotech launched Covaxin, a vaccine against the virus, which was approved for emergency use in January. However, the company’s production has been limited to around 20m doses per month.
Like many other countries in the region, India’s success in controlling the virus was that governments did not invest in vaccines with the need for Europe or the US, where the pandemic was intense and normal life closed.
“The government seriously believed that Covid-19 would disappear in January, and it did not have a plan B,” said Murali Neelakantan, a former world consultant for the pharmaceutical companies Cipla and Glenmark.
The companies did not want to invest to strengthen capacity, “because the Indian government drowned in the noise that ended the pandemic, a sign of demand,” Neelakantan said. “It wouldn’t cost much, that’s what hurts.”
Also, Japan did not default vaccine development, said Ishii. Although the country’s researchers created a large number of candidates – including cutting-edge DNA and RNA jabs – none of them progressed beyond small-scale trials.
Japan was not the only one in that, he said, such as France and Switzerland large drug companies such as GSK, Sanofi and Merck, which have also been fighting for vaccines.
What he showed, Ishiki said, was the need to combine state-of-the-art science, the organizational strength of a large pharmacy, and a government-free attitude. “If BioNTech were the only company in Germany, it would not be able to put the vaccine the way Pfizer did,” he said.
The picture is similar in South Korea, where the focus is on manufacturing industrial contracts, a local analyst said he did not want to name. “Developing new vaccines in the short term requires a lot of money, technology and researchers, but South Korea doesn’t have all of them,” the analyst said.
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China is the exception to Asia. The success of developing and mass-producing vaccines proves that the capacity is not limited to Europe and the US. In fact, the slow progress of vaccination partly reflects Beijing’s decision to become a world leader in medicines.
Chinese manufacturers export almost half of their production to Beijing to fill diplomatic promises about insertion abroad. Zhong Nanshan, China’s chief epidemiologist and government adviser, said this month that the vaccine rate remains “far from sufficient” to gain herd immunity.
On the five-year horizon, said Margaret Labban, chief life sciences analyst at IHS Markit in London: “We hope that… China will be truly competitive in the biotechnology industry around the world and completely overturn the traditional form of pharmaceutical innovation.”
Additional reports by Edward White and Song Jung in Seoul and Christian Shepherd in Beijing
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