The head of the World Trade Organization says it's paramount to diversify vaccine manufacturing and develop production in Africa and Latin America to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
On the eve of a global health summit in Rome, WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala told European Union legislators on Thursday that normal market forces for exports and imports can't apply when it comes to the life-or-death issue of Covid-19 vaccines. Many of the world's wealthiest nations were hoarding the shots for their own population.
She says the world has the capacity to manufacture 5 billion vaccine doses overall but as the virus has spread “we require twice and three times that. So the capacity was not there.”
A main challenges is diversifying vaccine production, which is now 80% concentrated in 10 European, North American and South Asian nations. She says “Africa, with 1.3 billion people, has 0.17 % of the manufacturing capacity of the world,” and Latin America has about 2% of global production capacity. “This has to change.”