Good Day BIO: Vaccine equity & bad bird flu

BIO joined with the international industry to offer a practical solution for global vaccine access that doesn’t hurt innovation. Also, it’s not even Halloween and we’re already excited for Thanksgiving—or we would be, if the price of turkey wasn’t skyrocketing. Biotech has a solution. (596 words, 2 minutes, 58 seconds)

‘A practical solution to vaccine equity’

At the close of a meeting on equity and access in India last week, BIO, the Developing Countries Vaccine Manufacturers’ Network (DCVMN), and the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) announced they would join forces in support of the Berlin Declaration.

The Berlin Declaration,which launched in July, has three goals:

1. Drive innovation in advance of the next pandemic. The biopharmaceutical industry will work “with regulators and other stakeholders to establish streamlined approaches to develop and deliver new quality, safe and effective vaccines, and treatments even faster in the future.”
2. Aim for faster manufacturing scale-up for high-volume global supply. This requires “unrestricted trade and no export bans across the [vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics] supply chain and expedited processes for import and export during a pandemic…Predictable demand from lower-income countries would be important for supporting pandemic readiness.”
3. Plan ahead for affirmative equitable access and delivery of pandemic products, including defining and rapidly updating priority populations and pandemic “standard of care” clinical guidelines, as well as setting up “strong, fully funded international procurement mechanisms” for lower-income countries, without restrictive clauses. 

This would help get vaccines to people who need them—as opposed to the misguided intellectual property waiver, which didn’t help get shots in arms and only threatens future innovation. 

To date, vaccine manufacturers have produced nearly 16 billion COVID vaccines—and in the first year of the pandemic alone, 1 billion were specifically directed to COVAX for distribution to lower-income countries.

How? Thanks to over 350 business partnerships including voluntary licensing agreements and technology transfers—read more on Bio.News.

The next steps: The three groups invite the G7, the G20, and multilateral organizations to include the Berlin Declaration in future pandemic preparedness planning.

More Reading: How biotech companies voluntarily shared COVID-19 technologies

Your Thanksgiving turkey might cost more this year…

But if we can deploy biotech solutions like gene editing, we can ensure future dinners don’t gobble up all your dollars.

Like a lot of food right now, the price of turkey is up. The cost of uncooked poultry is up 17% in September 2022 compared to September 2021, reports USA Today, with the average cost of a pound of whole frozen turkey at $1.46, compared to $1.15 at this time last year.

Sure, we can blame inflation—and as we reported recently, climate change is driving food inflation as extreme heat and drought reduce crop yield and kill food animals.

There’s also avian flu. The highly pathogenic H5N1 strain is sweeping the globe, killing more than 50 billion birds in the U.S. alone. Iowa, a top turkey producer, has lost more than 13 million, says USA Today.

But there’s a solution: gene editing,which allows us to breed birds resistant to bird flu (and pigs resistant to deadly disease and cows that can withstand extreme heat).

But we’ll say it again:regulatory approval pathways—and consumer education—need to catch up to ensure we can get this technology to the farm and our plates.

More Health Care News: 

The New York Times (Opinion): We may only have a few months to prevent the next pandemic
“There are dozens of reforms needed and debated, but three areas require immediate attention and investment: disease surveillance, strengthening of the global health care work force, and ensuring equitable access to treatments and vaccines,” writes Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency doctor and professor at Brown who survived Ebola.  

President Biden’s Tuesday: Receiving his updated COVID vaccine and delivering remarks on the state of the pandemic at 2:05 PM ET.

What’s Happening on Capitol Hill: Recess. On Thursday, Center Forward will hold a virtual congressional briefing on antimicrobial resistance and pandemic preparedness, featuring BIO’s Emily Wheeler—register here.