Equipping six African countries with competent laboratories for the production of vaccines against HIV and many other diseases was one of the major resolutions of the EU-AU summit held in Brussels on 17 and 18 February.
Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia. These are the six African countries chosen by the World Health Organization to produce vaccines for the continent. Indeed, Africa has suffered from a critical lack of vaccines in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. To rectify this, the UN agency has selected these countries to host their own vaccine production facilities not only for HIV but for other diseases as well.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has shown, better than any other event, that relying on a handful of companies to provide global public goods is restrictive and dangerous,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. An initiative that aims to empower African countries in terms of access to quality health care. “The best way to deal with health emergencies and achieve universal health coverage is to significantly increase the capacity of all regions to produce the health products they need,” he said.
A heart-warming measure
Clearly, the WHO’s initiative is a heart-warming one, given that only 1% of the vaccines used in Africa are currently produced on the continent of some 1.3 billion people. While in 2021, WHO supported an mRNA technology laboratory in South Africa to help manufacturers in low- and middle-income countries produce their own vaccines. The South African, Senegalese and Kenyan presidents expressed their delight at this major step forward, describing the event as historic.
In addition, these new units, initially designed to produce vaccines against cancer, will be able to produce other vaccines and treatments, such as insulin, anti-cancer drugs, and possibly vaccines against malaria, tuberculosis and HIV.
A revolution with a restriction
However, there is one important restriction on this ingenious idea of producing vaccines in Africa. This is the lifting of patents. A thorny issue on which the leaders of the two continents have not agreed. The six African countries selected will produce vaccines, but these local pharmaceutical production units will always remain dependent on those in Europe, because of the need to protect intellectual property rights.
Competence required to produce RNA vaccines on a large scale
The World Health Organization has committed, as is its duty, to accompany the six selected countries in developing an action plan for training and support so that they will produce vaccines as soon as possible. To this end, training sessions are scheduled to start in March. The UN health agency wants to ensure that manufacturers in these countries have the know-how to produce these mRNA vaccines, the technology used by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. France, Germany and Belgium, together with the European Commission, have committed to investing 40 million euros to help with technology transfer.
It should be noted that the South African centre will produce mRNA vaccines in the laboratory and is in the process of scaling up to commercial scale. As a reminder, African countries’ access to vaccines during the covid crisis leaves much to be desired, thus creating inequalities in the world between rich and poor countries. As a result, of the more than 10.4 billion doses of Covid vaccine administered worldwide, only 11.3% of Africans had been fully vaccinated by early February. While almost 62% of the world’s population has received at least one injection.
