A rare opportunity for Africa to start producing more of its own vaccines has come up as a result of the pandemic, but unless buyers purchase stock produced on the continent, all efforts will be in vain.
This was the view expressed by top-notch experts at the Ports to Arms Global Summit in Abuja, Nigeria, this week.
Nigerian finance minister Zainab Shamsuna Ahmed said the pandemic had exposed “how vulnerable we are in Africa in terms of vaccines”.
The pandemic has brought an opportunity to look deeply into what we need to do and who we should be reaching out to.
— Nigerian finance minister Zainab Shamsuna Ahmed
As it is, only one to two percent of all vaccines consumed in Africa are made on the continent, she said, but “the pandemic has also brought an opportunity to look deeply into what we need to do and who we should be reaching out to, so they can walk with us on this journey by investing in manufacturing on the continent”.
According to CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) head Richard Hatchett, the way vaccines have been rolled out inequitably during the pandemic “is directly related to how it was all configured in the beginning of the pandemic with vaccine nationalism and hoarding highlighting the inadequacy of the system”.
He said the landscape had shifted dramatically since then and political will had been mobilised, but the outcomes were determined by what happened initially.
“The emergence of a regional focus and mutual support in the AU are trends that should be saluted,” he said, adding the “convergence of political will, scientific advancement and the mobilisation of finance has given us a rare opportunity to advance vaccine manufacturing on the continent”.
“I am feeling optimistic,” he said.
Stavros Nicolaou, head of Aspen Pharmacare, which has teamed up with Johnson & Johnson to produce the first “from scratch to finish” Covid vaccines in SA, said “the single biggest learning” during the pandemic is that “local capacity solves local problems”.
He said: “We need to have our own capability in Africa. We don’t know the trajectory of Covid, and we are certainly not out of the woods with this pandemic or any future pandemic. We have to seize this narrow window of opportunity and ensure that there is delivery.”
He said the two most important aspects of that are having a good technology partner and making sure multilaterals start procuring from Africa.
“Africa remains a serial importer of medicines. It makes sense when we have the biggest disease burden. The more we talk about it the less it happens, and HIV is case in point. We make up 65% of the consumption of ARVs globally yet we import over 90% of them. So that is the single biggest thing to get right: multilaterals need to start procuring from Africa.”
He said if those demands are not sustained and procurement agents don’t buy from Africa, “inevitably you shut down those capacities for this and future pandemics.”
He concluded: “This is a unique moment to press the button for local capacity, but we need the agencies like Covax, Gabi and others to place orders.”
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