Why isn’t more Covid-19 vaccine available immediately?
To truly control the pandemic, most people around the world need to be vaccinated against Covid-19. That’s a tall order involving billions of shots.
By the end of this year, only about 70 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer and BioNTech and from Moderna and the National Institutes of Health are expected to be shipped out worldwide. Next year, that number will jump to more than 1 billion. Other companies are also working on vaccines, but some populations still might not gain access until 2024.
In the meantime, the death toll continues to rise.