While the motivations and underlying reasons for the Quad may be diplomatic—i.e., to reduce China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific—its instruments of action as announced at the Quad summit last week would make Quad a force for global good. The plan to expand vaccine manufacturing capacity by up to 1 billion doses would result in hundreds of millions more people being able to access safe and efficacious Covid-19 vaccines. These are countries that have so far been excluded from the benefits of extraordinary vaccine science and innovation and had to depend on whatever type of vaccine supplies they could get.
Members of the Quad alliance are launching a game-changing vaccine partnership under which India will manufacture US and EU developed vaccines with Japanese and US funding and logistics and distribution support from Australia. It is a model which takes advantage of complementarity in the resources, expertise, capacity and experience which each of the four partners can bring to this effort to help additional countries vaccinate their populations with proven and efficacious vaccines and contribute to accelerating the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Quad’s pursuit of building on shared interests and addressing common challenges could not have been met better by any other area than expanding vaccine manufacturing and facilitating greater cooperation in the Indo-Pacific on vaccine supply chain and logistics. The vaccine supply component of the Quad partnership is also strategically clever—it starts with an area where all four participating countries have clear mutual goals while leaving aside more conflictive issues such as trade, for perhaps later stages.
In addition to being a key supplier to COVAX, the global mechanism for supplying Covid-19 vaccines to low and middle-income countries, India has also been donating vaccines produced by the Serum Institute of India (SII) and Bharat Biotech to its neighbours in the South Asia region, and also to Brazil and some other countries in Latin America. Even pre-Covid, 44 of the 155 vaccines prequalified by the World Health Organization (WHO) are from Indian companies and Indian vaccine manufacturers produce as much as 60 percent of the vaccine doses sold worldwide. This highly visible partnership under Quad further enhances India’s global visibility as a vaccine manufacturing “heavyweight” and perhaps also provides a chance to demonstrate India’s growing interest in being an important player in the life sciences research and innovation panorama. It also gives a huge push to India’s programme of diversifying supply chains from China and its Aatmanirbhar Bharat initiative. Nonetheless, to achieve global primacy, India needs to keep a check on the domestic numbers of Covid patients shuffling in the country.
Unlike other multi-country partnership alliances which remain limited to high-level diplomatic discussions for the initial few years, the Quad vaccine partnership has clear and concrete areas to quickly start routine exchanges between different government agencies across all four countries. For example, the US Development Finance Corporation (DFC) is working closely with India’s private sector companies such as Biological-E, a mutually beneficial partnership that can lead to greater investments and open new markets for Indian life science companies.
Thus far, most parts of the global response to Covid-19 have been about bilateral deals, large countries pulling all the supplies, export controls on critical medical supplies, and a whole lot of finger-pointing. Some would argue that instead of a regional alliance such as the Quad, vaccine manufacturing and distribution should be addressed through a truly global response, a partnership among all. Such worries are not entirely unfounded. Health and vaccines entering regional and Cold War-type geopolitical rivalries is a somewhat distressing prospect. However, it is worth examining this from the viewpoint of the countries in the Indo-Pacific region and their current status quo.
Many countries in the region (e.g., Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia) have received vaccine doses from China and some are now starting to receive doses from COVAX. Notwithstanding issues related to lack of transparency of phase 2/3 clinical trial data from some of the vaccines developed and manufactured in China, South-east Asian countries also remain uncertain of the delivery times for the vaccines they have agreed to obtain from China. Some reports suggest that the volume orders are taken by China-based vaccine developers/manufacturers, and their installed manufacturing capacity, coupled with their need to also fulfill domestic demand in China, do not add up to allow timely deliveries. The countries in Southeast Asia are seeking to diversify their sources of Covid-19 vaccine supply, and rightly so. So, if nothing else, having an additional source of J&J vaccine manufactured in India would expand their choice set. In addition to their use in Southeast Asia, some of these additional 1B doses can be exported to other regions of the world and/or provided to COVAX for equitable global distribution.
The potential benefits of this partnership also extend into the long term. It is in global interest to ensure that the current pandemic serves as the basis for becoming better prepared for future pandemics. Two key areas in preparedness plans would be the need to have fast-response production capacity for vaccines which is geographically distributed around the world; and supply chain readiness to distribute the manufactured vaccines quickly. Working with Australia to develop a fast response logistics infrastructure for some of the most difficult logistical regions in the world, such as island states and archipelago nations, not only helps in making vaccines available to populations in these logistically difficult geographies in the region, it also helps develop stronger know-how for how to serve such regions in future pandemics.
The goal to have sufficient production capacity and supply chain response capacity to immunise the entire world within a few months of the start of a pandemic can only be met through international cooperation. The Quad is a partnership with a focused regional goal, but its instruments provide learnings to apply in three areas: How can regional alliances and partnerships help in creating more geographically diversified medical supply chains? How can India and the US leverage the Quad vaccine manufacturing partnership to establish more meaningful longer-term collaboration in the life science sector-a partnership/collaboration built on valuing innovation and manufacturing science? How can the US forge meaningful bilateral, regional, and multilateral partnerships to regain its important role in global health security? Only time will tell, but meanwhile any increases to vaccine manufacturing capacity save lives, and the Quad announcement is an exciting development on that front.
Prashant Yadav, PhD, is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, Professor at INSEAD, and lecturer at Harvard Medical School. Rajesh Mehta is a leading international consultant & columnist working on Market Entry, Innovation & Public Policy. The views expressed are personal.