Advanced Purchase Agreements for Covid-19 Vaccines Analysis and Comments

Advanced Purchase Agreements (APAs) were part of a strategy to provide upfront financing for Covid-19 vaccines and to accelerate their development and availability. Since the beginning of the pandemic, governments have spent at least €93 billion on COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics globally.
It is the correct public policy response to use public financing to ensure pandemic products are developed rapidly and become available equitably.

This paper examines the texts of several APAs to determine, to the extent possible, if the conditions in the contracts themselves are likely to ensure that this public goods goal is met. Of the 5 contracts the authors were able to obtain for this paper (4 APAs and one research and development funding contract, all of which are linked in Annex B), 3 were heavily redacted, which was a key challenge in the assessment.

In particular the paper looks at the APAs conditions along twelve themes, chosen for their particular significance to achieving widespread, rapid, and equitable access to the vaccines resulting from those contracts.