Angela Merkel’s party slumps on Covid woes as German polls loom: Global players brainstorm to boost vaccine output

GENEVA: Global players are gathering online from Monday (today) to brainstorm ways to rapidly boost vaccine production and fight a still-virulent coronavirus that has hobbled the world for 14 months.

Giving impetus to the meeting is a warning from the Geneva-based World Health Organisation (WHO) that the pandemic will not end unless poor countries can keep up with accelerating mass vaccination campaigns in rich nations.

Meeting online on Monday and Tuesday will be partners of the Covax vaccine distribution initiative, led by the Gavi vaccine alliance and backed by research arm the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations as well as the WHO.

Government delegates, scientists and representatives of the pharmaceutical giants as well as smaller drug makers from developing countries will also participate. The aim is "to shine the light on the gaps that we have currently in the supply chain, of reagents, of raw material, of products that you need to make vaccines", WHO’s chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan told a news conference on Friday.

The pharmaceutical industry aims to produce 10 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses this year, which is double the 2019 manufacturing capacity for all kinds of vaccines. Manufacturing these jabs requires not just an unprecedented quantity of ingredients, but also items such as glass for the vials and plastic for their caps -- at a time when global supply chains have been disrupted by the pandemic, Swaminathan said. "So the summit is really focusing on that upstream area, the gaps, how they can be filled and for solutions to be found."

Such interventions "can make a difference in the short term" even as WHO and others are already eyeing the longer-term course of the pandemic, she added.

Pressure from governments and public opinion has helped push the pharma groups, who usually jockey for a competitive advantage, into deals to produce more vaccine doses. With its own vaccine development lagging, France’s Sanofi will produce both the Pfizer-BioNTech and the Johnson & Johnson versions.

Merck will also turn out the J&J shots, Switzerland’s Novartis will make doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Curevac vaccine, while Germany’s Bayer is also set to help Curevac. Such deals are "very welcome", Swaminathan said.

"We would like to see more of this happening and in more parts of the world. "We need to explore the fill-and-finish capacity in Asia, in Africa and Latin America and use those facilities to increase supply."

Meanwhile, Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU bloc fell to 32 percent in a survey carried out by the Kantar institute for Bild newspaper on Sunday, a two-percent drop on last week that pushes Germany’s biggest political force to its lowest level since March 2020.

"There are many reasons for the decline, and they all have to do with the pandemic," said Bild. The slump is bad news for the conservatives ahead of the March 14 elections for regional parliament in the states of Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Wuerttemberg.

Both polls are being closely watched as a test of the national mood ahead of Germany’s general election on September 26 -- which will be the first in over 15 years not to feature outgoing chancellor Merkel. In Rhineland-Palatinate, the CDU/CSU has now fallen behind the centre-left Social Democrats, while the Green party leads surveys in Baden-Wuerttemberg.

Merkel’s centre-right CDU and their Bavarian CSU sister party hit a popularity peak of nearly 40 percent last spring, when Germany won plaudits at home and abroad for successfully suppressing the first Covid-19 wave.

But Europe’s top economy was hit hard by a virus resurgence at the end of 2020, and Merkel’s coalition government has increasingly found itself in the firing line. Despite months of painful shutdowns, the country’s infection numbers have stopped falling in recent days.

The slow pace of Germany’s vaccination campaign, snarled by distribution issues and red tape, as well as a delayed start to mass rapid coronavirus testing have further eroded confidence in the government.

Adding to Merkel’s woes is a growing scandal linked to the procurement of face masks early on in the pandemic. A CSU lawmaker, Georg Nuesslein, was last month placed under investigation for bribery following accusations that he accepted some 600,000 euros ($715,000) to lobby for a mask supplier.

A similar controversy has embroiled CDU lawmaker Nikolas Loebel, whose company took a 250,000-euro commission for acting as an intermediary in mask contracts. Loebel announced on Sunday that he was bowing out of politics.