WTO chief says world needs to double or even triple vaccine production

Geneva [Switzerland], May 17 (ANI/Sputnik): The world needs to boost the production of vaccines, doubling or even tripling it, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the World Trade Organization chief, said at the Paris Peace Forum on Monday.
"We need to scale up manufacturing [of vaccines]. Right now the world is capable of manufacturing about 5 billion doses of all kinds of vaccines but now we need to double that - to 10-15 billion doses. And the point is that we do not have the manufacturing capacity to do this," she said.
According to the WTO chief, the world needs to invest in three components to battle the pandemic - preparedness, response and resilience.
She also outlined several priorities that the upcoming G20 and G7 summits should concentrate upon. According to Okonjo-Iweala, the first priority is sharing since "we can still achieve a lot by sharing doses [of vaccines]."
The next priority is manufacturing and it will be very important if the world has partnerships between private sectors and the government. Lifting restrictions on outputs and supply chains is also of major importance, the WTO director general added. (ANI/Sputnik)