The World Health Organization approved AstraZeneca PLC's Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use on Monday, clearing the way for the first shipments of free vaccines from the West's main effort to inoculate the world's poorest nations.
Many developing countries rely on the WHO's emergency-use listing -- which signals that a vaccine is considered safe and effective and that its supply chain has been checked -- to authorize the shots at home. It also triggers purchase orders that the WHO-supported Covax facility made with vaccine manufacturers.
The Covax facility, which is financed mostly by rich Western governments and charitable groups such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, aims to supply some 2.27 billion vaccine doses this year to 145 countries, the majority of them free. Doses produced by AstraZeneca and its manufacturing partners are expected to make up about a third of that effort, and more than half of the vaccines due to be supplied in the first half of 2021.
"Today's announcement...allows everybody to access vaccines," said Deusdedit Mubangizi, who heads the WHO unit that approved the listing.
The initial approval covers doses produced by AstraZeneca and South Korea-based company SK Bioscience. A separate emergency-use listing for the same shots made by the Serum Institute of India is expected to follow as early as Tuesday.
By the end of 2021, Covax aims to vaccinate 20% of the populations of the world's 92 poorest countries. That effort is likely to far outstrip vaccine donations from China, Russia and India, three nations that have in recent weeks flown vaccines to numerous developing nations, sparking criticism over the West's slow pace to share its shots.
Rich nations have bought up the majority of vaccine doses due to be produced this year, often covering their population multiple times over as they wait for different shots to pass clinical trials and be cleared by national regulators. The WHO said last week that three-quarters of the shots administered so far were given in just 10 countries that account for 60% of global gross domestic product. Almost 130 countries, with 2.5 billion people, have yet to administer a single dose, it said.
WHO officials said Monday that the AstraZeneca listing should start to change that dynamic, although they stopped short of giving a date for when the first Covax vaccines will actually be sent. Last month, the WHO approved an emergency-use listing for the Covid-19 vaccine made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE.
However, that shot is more expensive than the AstraZeneca one and needs to be stored at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit, which is challenging for many poor countries that don't have the required sophisticated freezers. Supplies of the Pfizer shot are also much more limited, with Covax expecting to receive just 1.2 million doses by June and 40 million by the end of the year.
By contrast, Covax has secured some 336 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which the company developed with the University of Oxford, for the first half of 2021.
Covax's dependence on the AstraZeneca vaccine has come under scrutiny since a small clinical trial showed earlier this month that the shot doesn't appear to prevent mild and moderate Covid-19 from a new coronavirus variant first identified in South Africa. The South African government has suspended a planned rollout of the shot to healthcare workers, even though WHO officials recommended that countries continue using the vaccine.
The officials, and other vaccine experts, say they are confident that the vaccine can still protect against severe cases of Covid-19, including hospitalizations and deaths, from new virus strains.
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