New 100-Day Target for Vaccine Deployment during Pandemic

By Joyce Ojanji

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations (CEPI) has set a new  100-day goal for the deployment of new vaccines for future pandemics.

The announcement was made during the 53rd World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland to discuss what key lessons had been learned from the pandemic.

According to Richard Hatchett, Chief Executive Director (CEO) of CEPI, delivering vaccines to new threats within 100 days,  would give them a fighting shot of preventing pandemics altogether and reducing their impact.

‘’The medical and scientific response to the pandemic was nothing short of heroic; the political response, perhaps predictably, a little less so,” he said. “I think we can all acknowledge that the response to the pandemic has been marked by considerable inequity of access to medical countermeasures – and particularly to vaccines, “he said.

Hatchet identified the uneven distribution of vaccine manufacturing capacity as an important root cause of that inequity adding that scarcity was also the driver of the 100 days mission.

In addition, Hatchett also announced a new partnership between CEPI (an alliance to finance and coordinate the development of new vaccines to prevent and contain infectious disease epidemics) with the Institut Pasteur Dakar, to build a modern, modular flexible manufacturing facility in Dakar to deliver vaccines across the African continent.

He noted that it’s the first of a manufacturing network of developing country manufacturers that CEPI has announced.

The world leaders and CEPI also focused on how to improve the record-breaking speed of COVID vaccine development and rollout, and how to overcome political obstacles to ensure vaccines are made more readily available to all.