Pharma — manufacturing: the unappreciated and overlooked indispensable skill

Abstract

The process of vaccine production, manufacturing, is time-intensive, complex, expensive, and highly technical, requiring close coordination and collaboration among multiple companies with different inputs, from active pharmaceutical ingredients to glass, and specializations, and with the supply chains spread across many countries. Covid-19 pandemic highlighted that neglecting and ignoring the need for a global effort in vaccine manufacturing and delivery can have alarming, and devastating, repercussions, especially when the world needs a robust healthcare ecosystem to make sure that all of us are safe. So, the natural question is: what does the world need to be well-prepared for the next virus; what does it take to have the manufacturing of vaccines become less concentrated in a few countries and centers and diversified to more countries so that distribution can be more universal, so that all of us are safe? First will need to be the political recognition, and the acceptance, that no country can do or supply everything alone in the pharmaceutical sector — no country can be an island —and that binding international agreements will need to be adopted to make access to medicine more equitable and secure around the world. Furthermore, and critically so, significant long-term sustained investment in human resources must be adopted to fill major gaps in expertise, starting with a robust educational system whose graduates have the knowledge, ability, and capacity to work in this technical industry. Only then, with a professional-educated labor force, can resilient pharma-manufacturing clusters be successfully built throughout the world, which can, and will, give life to the new health code: “No one is safe, until everyone is safe.”