American export controls threaten to hinder global vaccine production

LAST WEEK, the billionth dose of covid-19 vaccine was made. It is a sign of how greatly capacity has expanded over the past six months that the next billion could be produced by May 27th, according to Airfinity, an analytics firm (see chart). Yet this ambition is at risk from American export controls on raw materials and equipment. Production lines in India, turning out at least 160m doses of covid vaccine a month, will soon grind to a halt unless America supplies 37 critical items.

On April 16th Adar Poonawalla, head of the world’s biggest vaccine-maker, the Serum Institute of India (SII), begged President Joe Biden, in a tweet, to “lift the embargo of raw material exports out of the US...Your administration has the details”. Suresh Jadhav, SII’s executive director, says that in the next four to six weeks manufacturing of two vaccines will be affected: AstraZeneca’s, of which SII makes 100m doses a month, and Novavax’s, of which it expects to make 60m-70m doses a month. SII says it first alerted the American government about this two months ago.

That was shortly after the Biden administration announced, on February 5th, plans to use the Defence Production Act (DPA)—a law dating from the 1950s that grants the president broad industrial-mobilisation powers—to bolster vaccine-making. This...