The fast development of vaccines is an essential part of the long-term solution to
COVID-19, but vaccine development has high costs and carries the risk of high failure rates.
There are currently too few promising projects in the clinical trial pipeline to guarantee
at least one vaccine soon. More projects need to pass through the development pipeline in
parallel. Vaccines should ultimately be widely available to all who need them at low cost.
Private life-sciences companies under-invest in vaccine development, especially
when compulsory licensing and/or price regulations are imposed. Public funding is needed
to reduce the risks of investing in vaccine development, and also to balance compulsory
licensing and/or price regulations with incentives for private firms.
The public funding being put into identifying COVID-19 vaccines is too limited to carry
enough projects through so that at least one vaccine, and preferably more, become available
at large scale and low cost. Public budgets for these efforts need to be multiplied up several
times over. We propose a staged support scheme to tackle the COVID-19 vaccine challenge
and a moon shot programme to meet the challenge of future pandemics. We calculate the
public budget needed to ensure supply of COVID-19 vaccines. Although substantial, the
budget represents a bargain compared to the avoided health, social and economic costs
