Global public health security and justice for vaccines and therapeutics in the COVID-19 pandemic

A Lancet Commission for COVID-19 task force is shaping recommendations to achieve vaccine and therapeu-tics access, justice, and equity. This includes ensuring safety and effectiveness harmonized through robust sys-tems of global pharmacovigilance and surveillance. Global production requires expanding support for development, manufacture, testing, and distribution of vaccines and therapeutics to low-and middle-income countries (LMICs). Global intellectual property rules must not stand in the way of research, production, tech-nology transfer, or equitable access to essential health tools, and in context of pandemics to achieve increased manufacturing without discouraging innovation. Global governance around product quality requires channelling widely distributed vaccines through WHO prequalification (PQ)/emergency use listing (EUL) mechanisms and greater use of national regulatory authorities. A World Health Assembly (WHA) reso-lution would facilitate improvements and consistency in quality control and assurances. Global health systems require implementing steps to strengthen national systems for controlling COVID-19 and for influenza vacci-nations for adults including pregnant and lactating women. A collaborative research network should strive to establish open access databases for bioinformatic analyses, together with programs directed at human capac-ity utilization and strengthening. Combating anti-science recognizes the urgency for countermeasures to address a global-wide disinformation movement dominating the internet and infiltrating parliaments and local governments. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

Automated summary

The Lancet Commission for COVID-19 task force focuses on achieving equitable access to vaccines and therapeutics globally, while also emphasizing the importance of strengthening global pharmacovigilance and surveillance systems. Additionally, global production must expand support for vaccine and therapeutics development in low-and middle-income countries, as well as ensuring high standards of product quality governance.