In normal times, a vaccine is a health product that works its way to protect a person from a disease. But in the age of "new normal", vaccines can define a country's development level.
Advanced countries such as the US and UK started rolling out vaccination programmes last month as authorised agencies approved Pfizer's and Moderna's vaccine for emergency use, while developing countries have to wait longer as available vaccines of the two pharma giants are mostly reserved. Thailand is likely to get vaccines from AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish pharmaceutical company, around mid-year.
But after the Samut Sakhon virus outbreak, the government had to order two million doses from Sinovac, a Beijing-based company, with the first lot being delivered next month.
Thailand takes pride in its health policy. The universal healthcare scheme has won global recognition, and we are proud of our medical tourism, for instance. But the quest for Covid-19 vaccines has shed light on the country's insufficient capacity when it comes to health technology.
The Government Pharmaceutical Organisation, which started commercial operations in 1966, can manufacture some expensive medicines including antiretroviral drugs for HIV treatment. There are also several health research organisations under the Public Health Ministry including the Health System Research Institute and Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Program which enable knowledge sharing among scholars.
The government also founded the National Vaccine Institute in 2012, with an ambition to make Thailand a leader in vaccine development and manufacturing in Southeast Asia. Healthcare is a potential sector for promotion innovation-wise, given its long-established foundations, and because healthcare technology, when synergised with biotechnology and digitalisation, is a big earner.
But local companies and institutes have little incentive to grasp opportunities from healthcare technologies or innovations due to a scarcity of funding. An analysis from KPP Research, a unit under Kiatnakin Phatra Financial Group, said research and development (R&D) investment in Thailand accounted for just 0.8% of GDP between 2015 and 2019, lower than Malaysia (1.4%), Singapore (2.1%), and South Korea (4.5%).
Patents, an indicator for innovation capacity, are not promising, at 35 per million people -- lower than the average of high-middle income countries, with 171 granted patents per million. In terms of human resources, Thailand has 1,141 researchers per million people, far below Singapore (6,915) and South Korea (7,394), both of which entered economic modernisation in the same period.
Insufficient R&D support was clear in recent months when local institutions and companies were racing to develop Covid-19 vaccines.
Chula Specialist Vaccine Research Centre, under Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Medicine, started a Covid-19 vaccine research project last year with a 300 million baht grant from the government.
The grant has been delivered in instalments making it difficult for researchers to make quick progress in vaccine development. The grant is also considered small for making a breakthrough innovation such as a new vaccine.
No surprise that another vaccine developer, Baiya Phytopharm, a startup founded by researchers from CU's Pharmaceutical Sciences Faculty, must solicit donations.
Both private and public funders may not want to put large funds into R&D for future innovation for fear of uncertainty. But most successful innovations in the world started with someone taking a risk.
Those risks can be mitigated against if the donors value human capital and organisational capacity, and a growing collaborative culture that drives people from across disciplines to share ideas and deliver innovative solutions -- like in Silicon Valley where innovations originate from people with different backgrounds.
These elements are parts of the "intangible investment" described in Jonathan Haskel's and Stain Westlake's book Capitalism without Capital, which says these forms of investment are as important as investing in physical and technological infrastructure to set a condition for creating innovations.
The fact is a high-tech economy requires a suitable environment, in which intangible investment plays a big role by giving incentives to local companies, researchers, and individuals to develop their innovation capacity and enter the tech industry -- and in return, attract foreign investors from high-tech industries instead of those from the old economy.
Without this environment, the Thailand 4.0 strategy is unlikely to take off. This challenge applies to the healthcare sector.
Paritta Wangkiat is a Bangkok Post columnist.