By
Alexander Winning, JOHANNESBURG South Africa
Africa must expand vaccine manufacturing to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and future health emergencies, including by forging partnerships to boost expertise and investment, continental leaders and international health officials said on Monday.
Africa has struggled to acquire corona-virus vaccines and imports the vast majority of its medicines and medical equipment,
leaving it at the mercy of overseas supplies.
It’s mainly poor nations are falling behind
in the global corona-virus vaccination race with under 13 million doses
administered so far to the continent’s 1.3 billion people, the Africa Centres
for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said last week.
World Trade Organization director-general
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said it was “morally unconscionable and a serious economic
hit” that just 1.1 per 100 Africans had received a vaccine while in North
America the rate was over 40 per 100.
“Between a steeper fall and a weaker rebound,
Africa will have lost ground to other regions,” she told a virtual conference
organised by the African Union. “So to boost growth, trade and livelihoods, we
need to get vaccines to everyone who needs them.”
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, the
African Union’s COVID-19 response champion and leader of the African country
hardest hit by the corona-virus in terms of infections and deaths, said the
medium-term strategy should be to expand existing manufacturing facilities into
regional hubs.
“We also need to forge sustainable partnerships
with entities in both the developed world as well as the developing world,” he
said.
African countries, he added, could seek
guidance from countries like India and Brazil on how they developed their
generic pharmaceutical industries.
Africa now imports 99% of all its vaccines,
but should aim to reduce imports to around 40% by 2040, Africa CDC director
John Nkengasong said.
Okonjo-Iweala said that building more
manufacturing capacity would require long-term investments but countries could
offer incentives such as cutting tariffs on raw materials.
She encouraged WTO members to find a
“pragmatic outcome” to a proposal by India and South Africa that vaccine and
other medical patents be suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic to speed up technology
transfers to manufacturers with spare production capacity.
World Health Organization chief Tedros
Adhanom Ghebreyesus said WHO supports calls for manufacturers to remove
obstacles hindering access to critical health products.
“We continue to call on companies to share
know-how,” he told the conference.
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