Racing against COVID-19: a vaccines strategy for Europe

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Racing against COVID-19: a vaccines strategy for Europe

This Policy Contribution proposes a staged support scheme to tackle the COVID-19 vaccine challenge and a moon shot programme to meet the challenge of

Publishing date: 21 April 2020
Authors: Reinhilde Veugelers Georg Zachmann

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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.

About the authors

Reinhilde Veugelers

Prof Dr. Reinhilde Veugelers is a full professor at KULeuven (BE) at the Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation. She has been a Senior fellow at Bruegel since 2009. She is also a CEPR Research Fellow, a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and of the Academia Europeana. From 2004-2008, she was on academic leave, as advisor at the European Commission (BEPA Bureau of European Policy Analysis). She served on the ERC Scientific Council from 2012-2018 and on the RISE Expert Group advising the commissioner for Research. She is a member of VARIO, the expert group advising the Flemish minister for Innovation. She is currently a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of the journal Science and a co-PI on the Science of Science Funding Initiative at NBER.

With her research concentrated in the fields of industrial organisation, international economics and strategy, innovation and science, she has authored numerous well cited publications in leading international journals. Specific recent topics include novelty in technology development, international technology transfers through MNEs, global innovation value chains, young innovative companies, innovation for climate change, industry science links and their impact on firm’s innovative productivity, evaluation of research & innovation policy, explaining scientific productivity, researchers’ international mobility, novel scientific research.

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Georg Zachmann

Georg Zachmann is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel, where he has worked since 2009 on energy and climate policy. His work focuses on regional and distributional impacts of decarbonisation, the analysis and design of carbon, gas and electricity markets, and EU energy and climate policies. Previously, he worked at the German Ministry of Finance, the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, the energy think tank LARSEN in Paris, and the policy consultancy Berlin Economics.