A vaccine authorized in December for use in India may help solve one of the most vexing problems in global public health: How to supply lower-income countries with a COVID-19 vaccine that is safe, effective and affordable.
The vaccine is called CORBEVAX. It uses old but proven vaccine technology and can be manufactured far more easily than most, if not all, of the COVID-19 vaccines in use today.
“CORBEVAX is a game changer,” says Dr. Keith Martin, executive director of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health in Washington, D.C.
“The real beauty of the CORBEVAX vaccine that Drs. Hotez and Bottazzi created is that intellectual property of this vaccine will be available to everybody,” Keith Martin says. “So you can get manufacturers in Senegal, and South Africa and Latin America to be able to produce this particular vaccine.”
By contrast, the makers of Pfizer and Moderna, for example, are not sharing their recipe.
One drawback to the CORBEVAX technology is that it can’t be modified as quickly as mRNA vaccines can to adjust to new variants.
