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Six African countries will establish their own mRNA vaccine production in a game-changing move for a continent that is almost entirely reliant on imported Covid-19 vaccines.
Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Egypt and Tunisia have been selected by the World Health Organisation to be the first recipients of the technology from the UN agency’s global mRNA vaccine hub.
“No other event like the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that reliance on a few companies to supply global public goods is limiting, and dangerous,” said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
“The best way to address health emergencies and reach universal health coverage is to significantly increase the capacity of all regions to manufacture the health products they need.”
For much of the pandemic, wealthy countries monopolised the vast majority of global supplies of vaccines, leaving Africa to survive mainly on donations of vaccines, often close to their expiry date.
Currently, only around 11 per cent of Africans have been fully vaccinated. Poor domestic manufacturing capacity forces Africa to import 99 per cent of its vaccines.
The new move aims to revolutionise this dynamic. The WHO created the global mRNA technology transfer hub in South Africa last year to support manufacturers in low and middle-income countries to produce their own Covid-19 jabs.
The mRNA vaccines use technology that delivers a small piece of genetic code, which then tricks the body into producing antibodies that give people immunity against a virus like Covid-19.
The hub also aims to support the production of vaccines for diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV.
The announcement signifies “mutual respect, mutual recognition of what we can all bring to the party, investment in our economies, infrastructure investment and, in many ways, giving back to the continent,” said South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Over the last year, Mr Ramaphosa has been one of the most vocal critics of what he describes as the ‘vaccine apartheid’ between rich countries and the global south.
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