Vaccine production for COVID-19 immunizations has interrupted, delayed, re-organized, or completely suspended other shots, especially routine childhood vaccines. As a result, many countries have been experiencing a decline in immunization coverage of vaccine-preventable childhood diseases, including:  - Bacillus- Calmette Guérin - Polio, Diphtheria - Tetanus - Pertussis - Pneumococcal Measles Mumps and Rubella 

This phenomenon could lead to vaccine-preventable infections and related deaths during and following the pandemic. Twice as many children died of measles during the last 2019 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia also impacted these countries immunizations coverage.     Before COVID-19 shots became available, annual production of all vaccines in the world was about five billion doses, according to the 2020 World Health Organization Global Vaccine market report. The vaccine manufacturing process requires a range of development stages, from research to preclinical preparation, clinical trials, approval, manufacturing, and distribution. This operation employs highly skilled technical personnel such as basic science researchers, medical doctors, statisticians, medical writers, and team leaders with PhDs to name a few — and this type of personnel was in short supply, even before the coronavirus pandemic.  Hiring, training, and developing production and quality personnel to maintain the process and quality systems for vaccines is challenging. Technical competence, as well as knowledge of the latest technologies and global regulatory requirements are essential. Carving out manufacturing capacity for COVID-19 vaccines in such a short period of time requires the global vaccine production process to divert existing manufacturing capacity to make COVID-19 vaccines. Diversion of capacity for COVID-19 has already threatened the production of other therapeutic drugs, such as monoclonal antibodies, which are widely used to treat cancers.

The first COVID-19 vaccine was developed in less than a year, and its rollout was the fastest vaccine rollout ever achieved. Despite this record speed, however, by mid-March this year 2021, global COVID-19 vaccine production was still less than 500 million doses. The aim is to meet the projected global demand of an estimated 9.5 billion doses. Therefore, it’s still necessary to further scale up the production of doses needed to control the COVID-19 pandemic.