From the article:
Once a drug is proved safe and effective, getting it to millions of patients around the world requires a massive manufacturing capacity. Ramping up can take months, says Prashant Yadav, a visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development and an expert on healthcare supply chains. For instance, he estimates it would likely take six months to a year to sufficiently ramp up production to meet the potential global demand for remdesivir, should it prove effective and safe.
Given the urgent need for new drugs around the world, some public health officials have called for new protocols to determine who will decide how to allocate limited supply. There would have to be a way of coordinating the supply of drugs, with clear roles and responsibilities for fast-tracking treatments. This would involve an unprecedented level of coordination among the World Health Organization, organizations that finance global health measures, supply-chain experts in the pharmaceutical companies and governments. Once a country has obtained a drug, the government together with private health care organizations and drug companies have to fast-track distribution of the drugs.
"Can governments and global agencies make extremely fast decisions in the complex and somewhat uncertain environment?" asks Yadav. "How do we run a supply system so that every hospital that orders it can get sufficient supply? It's a capacity rationing problem: someone has to decide how much of demand will we need for existing supply. And as we know, rationing decisions bring out the worst in terms of global coordination and local and national politics. And if a company has never sold much in Africa then they will have to start from scratch."
