The international trade in human vaccines before COVID‐19

The recent COVID‐19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of global access to human vaccines. There is, however, no empirical work on either the unequal distribution of international trade or on its determinants. Applying a gravity model to the UN Comtrade database between 2000 and 2019, we explain the patterns of bilateral trade across 116 countries. Using the Poisson Pseudo‐Maximum Likelihood methodology, our results show that inequalities in international vaccine trade have steadily increased. In general, supply and demand drivers play a role in explaining the flow of human vaccines. The impact of these drivers varies depending on the income level of the importing country. High‐income countries intensify their flows with demand factors such as GDP per capita, or supply factors such as the location of big pharmaceutical companies. Conversely, low‐income countries receive more vaccines according to their population. Our results show that a poor country that houses a big pharmaceutical company acts as an exporting platform to developing and poor countries. Middle‐income countries present features similar to rich countries both by producing more and also by exporting more. The imbalance endangers the global fight against the current COVID‐19 pandemic.