When coronavirus vaccine is released, there won’t be enough to go around. Who will get it first? – ABC News

To get the world moving and kickstart international travel again, experts say we'll need up to 15 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine.

Distributing such large amounts at once is near impossible.

So, who are likely to get their hands on the vaccine first?

Around 120 labs globally are developing a vaccine, among them a promising Australian effort led by the University of Queensland.

Up to 12 candidates are in more advanced stages that's according to the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA).

"I think we have never in the history of vaccines seen so many labs, so many companies working on finding vaccines for the same disease," IFPMA chief Thomas Cueni said.

The advanced candidates have moved on to carry out tests on humans.

Ideally, you'd want to test the vaccine on tens of thousands of people before releasing it to the wider population, says bioethics expert Jonathan Moreno from Johns Hopkins University, which collates data on COVID-19 cases.

"In theory, you could do 20,000 with a vaccine and 10,000 with placebo, so that nobody knows who exactly is getting what," Professor Moreno said.

"And we would find out over six, eight, 10 months how that's gone but the world is not going to wait [that long]."

Professor Moreno says there's a deviation already, with some labs conducting animal and human studies simultaneously, which can speed up the process but is fraught with controversy.

"You'd want to [test] animals probably before people. But the schedule we're on now is such that we're doing animals in parallel to people," he said.

In any case, experts say the earliest we can see a vaccine is late 2020, early 2021.

"There may be a vaccine that people have some degree of confidence in terms of safety by the end of the year. That would be very fast schedule, everybody agrees," Professor Moreno said.

Because many parts of the world have been successful in flattening the curve, soon there may not be enough virus around for people to be naturally exposed to it.

Some are suggesting we could then conduct the controversial challenge studies, whereby volunteers are deliberately exposed to the virus.

"I think there's serious apprehension by doing it in terms of safety hazards, in terms of risks, in terms of ethical questions," Mr Cueni said.

"The problem is, if there's no other way then challenge studies may be the only option to do it."

Professor Moreno thinks the current political climate and impending election in the United States may speed up the release of a vaccine.

"It would not surprise me if the Trump Administration jumped on a vaccine that had guidance through some advocacy studies with a smaller group and before the election day in November," he said.

But Mr Cueni warns rushing a vaccine can deter public trust in medicine and encourage anti-vaxxer movements.

"If something goes wrong with the vaccine, you could do tremendous damage in the confidence of vaccination and immunisation," he said.

It's a "mindboggling" number, says Mr Cueni.

"If you really want to create herd immunity, you're basically trying to get 80 per cent of population immunised," he said.

"And on the assumption that you may need two doses rather than one, the numbers I've seen range from 12 to 15 billion doses."

Professor Moreno says achieving herd immunity is desirable.

"To get the world moving again and to get people comfortable with travel, you'd want to vaccinate everybody," he said.

The Department of Health told the ABC that Australia's "strategic goal" was to achieve herd immunity, in order to break the chain of transmission in the community.

Medicines Australia CEO Elizabeth de Somer says one vaccine won't cut it to reach herd immunity.

"I think that the world will need more than one in order to be able to manufacture it at a scale and magnitude that is required to vaccinate the world," she said.

The IFPMA estimates the global vaccines manufacturing capacity today is at five billion and it takes between five to 10 years to build a new vaccines manufacturing plant.

It's evident that vaccinating the global population at once is out of question not in the least because there aren't enough vials in the world to store the vaccine in.

"Everybody agrees that one will need to talk about allocation who'll get vaccinated first," Mr Cueni said.

Developing a vaccine is hard, but the mass production is in many ways harder, says Professor Moreno.

"The truth is, no factory can produce billions of doses, so there are going to be stages of this and there will be first users," he said.

Many experts believe those first users should be the society's most vulnerable.

"It's not hard to identify who these vulnerable people would be generally the older people, people with diabetes or high blood pressure," Professor Moreno said.

"And then essential workers, military, police officers, firefighters. Then you go down the list."

The Department of Health said details around establishing priority groups for a vaccination and how the vaccine would be distributed were still underway.

"As promising vaccine candidates emerge, decisions around roll-out of a national COVID-19 immunisation programme will be made by National Cabinet, based on the recommendations of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee," it said.

"Decisions will be made using the best available scientific evidence, an assessment of the relative risk of vulnerable groups as well as the stocks of vaccine available at any one time."

Professor Moreno believes it's inevitable the so-called elite countries will access the vaccine first.

"High-end countries they're in a better position. Follow the money," he said.

"We've already seen, you might call it vaccine nationalism, going on, and this is really disturbing.

"In a perfect world, you'd want the WHO [the World Health Organisation] to establish the guidance globally, but I will not predict what will happen now," he said, referring to US President Donald Trump's testy relationship with the organisation.

Mr Cueni hopes the world has learnt from the 2009 incident, when "rich countries" bought up all the vaccines against H1N1 a strain known as swine flu leaving "poor countries" stranded.

"This is something which led to a lot of bad blood," he said.

"I think there's now an understanding that we need to have this element of global solidarity."

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When coronavirus vaccine is released, there won't be enough to go around. Who will get it first? - ABC News