ET Analysis: Vaccinationalism a lose-lose game | Economic Times

The political dogfight over vaccines, its shortages and mudslinging on sharing stocks with other countries fails to recognise the ground realities of how this entire ecosystem works. Worryingly, it ends up creating an atmosphere detrimental to global cooperation, so critical for scaling up production. First up, it’s important to understand that there are two critical elements to making a vaccine — a licence and raw material supplies. Now, barring Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin, other vaccines Covishield (an AstraZeneca dose) and Sputnik or for that matter, most others in the pipeline are licensed from overseas. So, they have their commercial arrangements and obligations, like the Serum Institute of India (SII) has with AstraZeneca.The good part is that Indian companies have obtained several licences, largely because India has a robust vaccine-making industry base, which enjoys a healthy global reputation. But to assume that the government could hold sway like the US administration has on its vaccine makers would be a stretch, simply because entities like SII are commercially and legally entwined with their global partners.Having said so, those partners are posing no problems to Indian manufacturers. The issue really is with the supply chain, which for vaccines must be of the highest safety standards and absolutely fault-free. The incident at the Baltimore laboratory with J&J vaccines is a stark reminder of how a mix-up could push back an entire effort by months.On this score, all vaccine makers in India have deep supply links with global companies like Cytiva, Corning, Thermo Fisher and Ligand in the US, Sartorius and Merck in Germany, Datwyler in Italy and Pall Corporation in the Netherlands. It’s absolutely essential that for stepping up vaccine production in India, there is unencumbered flow of supplies from these companies.That’s where things get complex. Because it’s all good to get an IPR waiver for vaccines — US has supported the India-South Africa waiver proposal at the WTO — but way more complex to execute it without a fault-free, high-quality supply chain. Logically, as many would argue, a waiver of this sort should lead to compulsory licensing, but what help is that without these backend companies committing to supplies.A better way, therefore, could be what’s come to be known as the ‘Gilead model’, which is the voluntary licensing route which Gilead followed to provide licences directly to select manufacturers for production of antiviral drugs like Remdesivir. Because owning a patent is no guarantee for making the vaccine. Now, Indian companies are well set for this profile but it’s important to note that any such cooperation will come with global responsibilities. Already, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has raised doubts on this.“We now have a situation with India where, in connection with the emergency situation of the pandemic, we are worried whether the pharmaceutical products will still come to us. Of course, we have only allowed India to become such a large pharmaceutical producer in the first place, also from the European side, in the expectation that this should then also be complied with. If that is not the case now, we will have to rethink,” she said last month.India will also suffer if this debate around vaccine nationalism in Europe and North America gets any sharper, because countries like Germany or any other may squeeze out the raw material suppliers. After all, in the end, this is a global supply chain with shared responsibilities.So, moving forward, the government needs to come up with a bigger pitch along with its manufacturers, which looks to incentivise and attract suppliers by aiming to turn India into a vaccine-making hub, not just petition them each time to increase allocations.