GAVI, the WHO and related organizations are funding local vaccine development. To fool people in developing nations that the vaccines to be forced on them are really their own

No, peons, this is not a project out of Geneva, London or New York. Trust us. You will get the best BioNTech mRNA vaccines from a factory shipped to Rwanda last year from Germany, run by German staff

GAVI plans to spend a billion dollars on local vaccine production here. But some say local production is a bad idea. I do too, because it is simply a scam; you cannot set up a vaccine factory without a massive infrastructure to support it and well-trained and well-honed staff to manage it and troubleshoot the problems as they arise.

India’s Serum Institute is the world’s largest vaccine manufacturing facility and they are pushing back, though for commerical reasons, explaining that local production will actually cost more.

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MARCH 29, 2024 BY HELEN MURPHY

One lesson the Serum Institute’s leadership has drawn from the Indian company’s history is a commitment to economies of scale — and that’s led them to resist the growing demand for local vaccine production.

Scaling a giant

Anyone in the vaccine game knows of the Serum Institute. Already the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer — and a critical conduit of jabs to lower-income countries — the Indian biotechnology company is looking to make itself globally indispensable with a new malaria vaccine and a critical role in a new venture to respond to future outbreaks in less than 100 days.

But while Serum is expanding rapidly, it doesn’t believe local communities should be trying to follow in its footsteps.

One of the lessons that Serum’s CEO Adar Poonawalla has drawn from his company’s history is a commitment to economies of scale — and that has led him to caution against the burgeoning demand for local production, which grew out of the blatant vaccine hoarding seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Whereas most manufacturers produce vaccines in the tens of millions, Serum has the capacity to manufacture hundreds of millions, Poonawalla tells Devex contributor Andrew Green. “That brings about economies of scale,” he says, “and you can bring down the prices.”

“If you want these countries to get a product at the lowest possible price, you have to make it in one location or maybe two locations that are very large-scale to be able to do that,” he advises. The formula seems to be working for Serum: The institution estimates that roughly two-thirds of the world’s children receive at least one vaccine manufactured there.

Read: Local doesn't mean low cost — Serum Institute shares global scale-up plans

 Listen: Global development’s push toward locally led development is one of the topics of discussion in the latest episode of our weekly podcast, with Devex’s Raj Kumar and Fiona Zublin joined by the Brookings Institution’s George Ingram to discuss the top globaldev stories from this week.