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

新冠肺炎疫苗开发的步伐堪称了不起。在新型冠状病毒基因组序列公开后不到一年的时间里，世界各地的数百万人已经收到了许多可行的候选方案之一。尽管取得了这一巨大成就，但这些关键工具的全球影响和公共卫生价值仍有待证明。疫苗公平已经是全球卫生问题长期关注的焦点，在当前的危机中，它已成为地缘政治辩论的避雷针。全球卫生政策讨论往往侧重于确保广泛和公平分配疫苗的必要性，以及高收入国家的道德失败，这些国家通过双边交易和前期投资，获得的疫苗剂量远远超过其人口的需要。这项提议寻求一种不同于寻求发展更公平的分配制度的途径，以解决这些不平衡问题。相反，我们的调查从供应谈判转向上游，询问如何才能将公平获取纳入疫苗的设计中，尤其是疫苗的制造过程中。我们建议对南非、加纳和巴西的技术转让和协作生产过程进行深入、细致的分析。通过美洲、英国、德国和非洲大陆的社会科学学者之间的合作，我们希望在加快努力在全球南方建立和加强疫苗制造工作的同时，试点更实质性的国际研究合作。从社会科学的角度研究疫苗研发和制造将详细阐述社会和全球正义目前如何在这些过程中以及未来如何实施的比较见解和模型。

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.