Uneven geographies of vaccine manufacturing in the Global South: assessing the relations between research & development and global equity

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The pace of COVID-19 vaccine development is nothing short of remarkable. In under a year from when genomic sequence of the novel coronavirus was made publicly available, millions around the world have received one of many viable candidates. Despite this tremendous achievement the global impact and public health value of these critical tools remains to be demonstrated. Vaccine equity, already a long-standing focus of global health concern, has, in the current crisis, become a lightning rod for geopolitical debate. Global Health policy discussions have tended to focus on the need to ensure widespread and equitable vaccine allocation, as well as the moral failure of high-income countries that, through bilateral deals and upfront investment, have secured doses well in excess of the needs of their population. This proposal seeks to address those imbalances by pursuing a different avenue to those that seek to develop a more equitable system of distribution. Our investigation, instead, moves upstream from negotiations over supply, asking how might fair access can be built into the design of vaccines and critically, their manufacturing processes. We propose an in-depth, granular analysis of the tech-transfer and collaborative production processes in South Africa, Ghana and Brazil. Through the collaboration between social science scholars in the Americas, the United Kingdom, Germany and the African continent, we hope to pilot a more substantive international research collaboration that accompanies the accelerated efforts to build up and strengthen vaccine-manufacturing efforts in the Global South. Studying vaccine R&D and manufacturing from a social science perspective will elaborate comparative insights and models for how social and global justice is currently being enacted in these processes and could be in the future.