Supply · Analysis
Capacity is not deliverable supply
Installed antigen capacity, catalogue capacity and shippable doses of a matched strain are three different quantities. Confusing them makes shortages look impossible right up to the point they happen.
Add up published FMD vaccine capacity figures and the total comfortably exceeds most estimates of global requirement. Add up estimated sales and the picture changes. In our own producer dataset the summed 2026 capacity estimate sits well above the summed 2025 sales estimate — and the difference is not a reserve anyone can draw on at short notice.
Why headroom does not equal availability
- Strain specificity. A production line configured for serotype O and A antigen is not a source of SAT-2 doses. Capacity is only useful if it is capacity of the antigen you need.
- Antigen banking versus finished product. Concentrated antigen in storage is not a vialled, released, labelled product. Formulation, filling, release testing and registration all take calendar time.
- Registration and market access. A product licensed in one jurisdiction cannot simply be shipped into another; emergency provisions exist but are exceptions with their own timelines.
- Committed volume. Much nominal capacity is already allocated to domestic programmes and standing contracts. Uncommitted capacity is the relevant number and it is rarely published.
Capacity is a property of a factory. Supply is a property of a contract, a licence and a cold chain.
This is the reason our supply model applies an explicit addressable-share assumption to modelled sales rather than charting capacity against requirement. The default share is a stated assumption you can move, and the resulting line is labelled as whole-covered-market in scope. It is not an allocation to any single region, and we refuse to present it as one when a regional filter is applied.
A more honest reading
Capacity belongs in an analysis as a constraint on the medium term — it tells you what could be scaled if demand were funded and strains matched. It does not belong in a near-term gap calculation as if it were stock on a shelf. We keep the two in separate views for that reason, and we do not include announced or planned capacity at all unless a sourced value exists.
Sources cited
- WOAH — Vaccine banks
Explains why contingency antigen reserves are structured as call-off arrangements rather than available inventory.
- WOAH — Practical guidelines for national procurement of veterinary vaccines
Registration, specification and quality requirements that constrain which capacity can serve which market.
- FAO EuFMD — global FMD control workstream
Regional coordination context for antigen reserves and emergency response.
Independent analysis by Dr Bouda Vosough Ahmadi. Views are the author's own and carry no institutional endorsement. Figures referenced are model estimates from the Syntera FMD market module; see the methods page.