Frankfurt From shortage to abundance, this is the shift that has taken place in the Covid vaccine market over the past few months. While production capacity and the number of approved vaccines continue to grow, demand for the vaccines has now peaked.
In many African countries in particular there is still a lot of catching up to do when it comes to vaccination rates. On the other hand, the number of Covid vaccinations administered worldwide has been declining for three months.
This means there is increasing crowding in a shrinking market. Especially for the laggards in vaccine development, it seems increasingly difficult to play a bigger commercial role. This is all the more true as the leading providers Pfizer, Biontech and Moderna have already covered the demand in high-income industrialized countries with extensive supply contracts for their mRNA-based vaccines.
Overall, these companies already have orders with a volume of more than three billion cans or more than 50 billion dollars on their books for 2022.
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Despite this, research activity in the field remains significant. In its most recent overview, the WHO lists a record number of 344 Covid vaccine projects, almost 150 of which are in clinical development.
Around 30 Covid vaccines have now been officially approved worldwide, but the majority of them only in individual or very few countries. These include vaccines from Cuba, Iran, Kazakhstan and a number of Chinese Covid vaccines.
In Canada, a vaccine developed by the biotech company Medicago and Glaxo-Smithkline recently received initial approval. This product represents a scientific breakthrough as the first licensed vaccine made using genetically modified plants.
Nevertheless, it seems questionable whether the vaccine, which has shown an efficiency of around 70 percent in clinical studies, can play a role beyond Canada. So far, the Canadian company, which is majority owned by the Japanese pharmaceutical manufacturer Mitsubishi Tanabe, has not submitted any applications for approval in either the USA or Europe.
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The French Valneva was also recently able to register an initial approval for its Covid vaccine based on inactivated viruses, but only in Bahrain. At the European Medicines Agency Ema, on the other hand, the Valneva product is still in the rolling approval process, as are the protein-based vaccines from Sanofi and GSK and the vaccines from the Chinese Sinovac and the Russian Gamaleya Institute.
The experience so far with the vaccine from the US company Novavax, which was approved in the EU at the end of last year and has been delivered since February, shows how difficult it is to gain a foothold in the Covid vaccine business. Health politicians hoped that this first protein-based Covid vaccine would gain greater acceptance among previous vaccination skeptics and thus a significant increase in vaccination rates.
A vaccine with a long-lasting effect is still missing
In the first three and a half weeks since the market launch at the end of February, according to data from the Federal Ministry of Health, only around 53,000 of the 1.5 million doses delivered have been vaccinated in Germany. During the same period, 1.6 million people in Germany received the Biontech vaccine and more than 250,000 that of Moderna.
The challenge for the latecomers is, on the one hand, to show real clinical advantages over the now well-established mRNA vaccines, for which extensive efficacy data from practice are now available. These show that the protective effect of the mRNA vaccines against infections decreases relatively quickly, especially compared to the omicron variant. But overall, they continue to offer relatively solid protection against serious illness and death.
In contrast, the newcomer products cannot demonstrate a superior effect. Because they were also clinically tested in a phase when omicron was not yet prevalent. According to experts, a stronger shift in market shares would only be in sight if it were possible to develop vaccines with a universal and long-lasting effect against corona viruses. However, such projects are still in the early stages of research and are likely to take years.
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On the other hand, the latecomers also face the challenge that the market as a whole is shrinking – regardless of the continued high infection rates. In Germany, for example, the number of corona vaccinations administered in the last four weeks was only around 2.2 million, compared to more than nine million in January.
The trend is also declining worldwide, after a total of around 11.5 billion doses have now been administered. The experts at the British analysis company Airfinity, which follows the Covid market particularly closely, assume that around 150 million doses are still being vaccinated per week worldwide, compared to more than 250 million last October and November.
Manufacturers’ production volumes have also already fallen, to less than 200 million cans per week, Airfinity estimates, from more than 300 million in the second half of 2021.
Demand of up to 4.4 billion doses per year
It will be decisive for the longer-term potential of both the established providers and the newcomers, with which frequency and with which group of people booster vaccinations will be used in the future. Uncertainty in this regard remains significant.
Airfinity analysts currently see the most likely scenario as being that at least in higher-income countries, additional booster shots will be recommended for people aged 50 or 65 and older. The future annual requirement could thus be between 2.2 and 4.4 billion doses.
But even in this environment, the established market leaders Pfizer/Biontech and Moderna have the most favorable starting position. Both companies have now applied to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approval for a second booster vaccination with their established vaccines and are also already testing omicron-specific variants and various combination products in clinical studies.
According to Airfinity, Pfizer/Biontech and Moderna are currently the only Covid vaccine providers who are still signing new supply contracts. All other providers and developers, on the other hand, have been unable to agree on any new deals since mid-2021.
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