There was a clear consensus at the World Health Organisation (WHO) Africa regional conference with the World Economic Forum last week that building vaccine manufacturing capacity will not be instrumental to the current fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa, given that the time and resources required cannot be urgently activated.
It might take a minimum of three or more years to establish production structures, such as obtaining agreements on intellectual property, technology transfer, training and building infrastructure, Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director, Africa, said.
Despite seeing increased interest in production from high-income countries, African political leaders and even pharmaceutical companies with existing bases in Africa, Moeti said much of it would not resolve the current challenges of accessing vaccines for most of the continent.
“There is a great interest in some of the high-income countries to start something with some African countries to produce vaccines, but these are medium to long-term plans. To produce vaccines in this emergency mode, the infrastructure to do that will not only need an injection of capital. We will need to find investors in the process and it needs to be looked at going forward,” according to Moeti.
Similarly, Razia Khan, Standard Chartered Bank head of research and chief economist Africa and Middle East, said efforts to build manufacturing capacity would apply more to preparedness for future pandemic.
It will play a crucial role in terms of what needs to be done to boost the provision of healthcare services generally and encourage manufacturing in a greater number of localities.
“These are all important issues that do need policy solutions to be formulated now,” she said.
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Excluding Nigeria, countries including Senegal, South Africa and Rwanda are already seeing green light for manufacturing partnerships with the European Union listing them as centres for future manufacturing.
But in entirety, the capacity for vaccine manufacturing resides in five countries: Egypt, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia. The production here, however, is largely focused on last mile processes of packaging and labelling, playing down on the significant part of vaccine preparation.
Also, current vaccine capacities at less than 100 million doses are unable to address the scale of production needed to vaccinate the continent, according to WHO.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populated country with the eight-largest COVID-19 cases on the continent, requires roughly 300 million doses of vaccines to develop herd immunity, for instance.
So far, it has only had access to about 4 million doses of Astrazeneca vaccines, sufficient for less than 1 percent of its populations.
During the pre-pandemic period, sourcing vaccines in Nigeria and most African countries often came from donations from UNICEF supported by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, with fewer than 10 countries being self-sufficient in terms of vaccine procurement.
With this limitation in capacity and the urgency of response required by the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no immediate readiness to repurpose facilities for large-scale production through partnerships.
“It is therefore vitally important that African vaccine manufacturers establish supply networks to export to markets (in Africa and elsewhere). Supply chain could use the existing economic zones in Africa. For example, the Economic Community of West African States,” WHO advised in a report.
