The Race for a Vaccine Between Russia, China & the West

The race for the vaccine. Via the Economist.

There are more than 160 different vaccines under development across the world, all of the labs are racing to find the cure to a virus that shutdown an entire planet and has killed 750,000 people world wide as of this morning.  Whoever creates a safe, deliverable, vaccine for COVID 19 will not only be looked at as a savior in history, but they will also have control of the most valuable known substance on the planet.  A cure for countless human lives at risk, and the key to opening up the world’s economy.

The lab who wins the COVID 19 vaccine race, wins immortality, along with having the world’s governments and peoples, in their hands.

The Fed began doling out billions of dollars to pharmaceutical companies this spring, as part of Operation Warp Speed, which is an FDA fast track and a cash machine for labs working on a coronavirus cure.

In the US and EU pharmaceutical giants like Sanofi, AstraZeneca Plc, Moderna Inc., Pfizer Inc. & BioNTech SE are pouring billions of private and public money into the race for a vaccine. In China, the state supervised CanSino Biologics has received authorization and has already deployed its shots among the Chinese military, and the Russian Defense Ministry along with Moscow’s Gamaleya Research Institute,  announced this week that they had a working vaccine, which meant they skipped the 3rd phase of vaccine trials. (of which there are 3).

Russia’s vaccine, manufactured by Binnopharm in Zelenograd, claims it is highly effective and has passed all tests for deployment into a large population.  Putin himself told the press that his own daughter had already taken the vaccine and that it guarantees immunity from COVID 19 for at least 2 years.

Immediately, this vaccine was denounced by world health experts as reckless and misleading.  Including scientists in Russia itself, the Russian ‘FDA’ does not have nearly the same oversight from independent scientific bodies that the west has.  It is yet unproven by western standards if the Russian vaccine is safe for mass consumption.

Current race for Vaccine authorization:

Russia ins’t the only country trying to claim victory over covid-19, what is missing from their ‘victory’, is manufacturing.  The lab in Russia can manufacture 1.5 million doses a year, which sounds like a lot, but is not nearly enough to supply world demand, which is in the billions.

The biggest vaccine manufacturer in the world is The Serum Institute in India.  They have signed a deal with University of Oxford and British run AstraZeneca to produce their vaccine (when ready) at scale.

The Serum Institute can manufacture, “1 billion doses over the course of a year, almost half the overall total, with 400 million due before the end of 2020. They’ll be sold at cost until the end of the pandemic—in a recent deal to supply 100 million doses to low- and middle-income countries, Serum capped the price at $3 per shot—though even after that Poonawalla estimates he won’t charge much more than $13.”  (Bloomberg).