JOHANNESBURG, South Africa
South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa has opened a new vaccine manufacturing facility that he says will boost the country’s capacity to make its own inoculations for diseases including COVID-19.
The
plant in Cape Town — a partnership between a U.S.-based biotechnology firm, the
government and South African universities — will help improve Africa’s ability
to produce vaccines, Ramaphosa said Wednesday.
“The
pandemic has revealed the huge disparities that exist within and between
countries in access to quality healthcare, medicines, diagnostics and
vaccines,” said Ramaphosa. Africa is responding to COVID-19 with a “depth of
scientific knowledge, expertise and capacity,” to make its own vaccines, he
said.
The
factory was also launched by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the South African-born
founder of NantWorks, a multinational biotechnology firm based in the United
States that has invested about $200 million to start the facility, according to
local reports.
The
new plant aims to reach a goal of producing 1 billion vaccines annually by
2025, Soon-Shiong said.
South
Africa’s Aspen Pharmacare already assembles the J&J COVID-19 vaccine in a
factory in Gqeberha, formerly known as Port Elizabeth. The Aspen facility
blends the imported components of the vaccine and puts it in vials and packages
the doses, a process known as fill-and-finish. That facility has a capacity of
220 million vaccines per year and is selling them in South Africa and to other
African countries.
Another vaccine production plant in South Africa is operated by the Biovac Institute in Cape Town in a partnership with Pfizer-BioNTech to produce 100 million of its vaccine doses annually.
Ramaphosa
said Africa has secured 500 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines through the
African Union’s vaccine acquisition task team, but the continent needs more.
“These
doses represent only around half of what the continent needs to vaccinate 900
million people in order to achieve the 70% target set by the World Health
Organization,” said Ramaphosa.
In
addition to producing vaccines for COVID-19, the new facility will focus on
developing products to fight HIV, different types of cancer and other diseases
that may not be a huge problem in other parts of the world but are major health
problems in Africa.
The
new facility will help address public health challenges confronting the
continent, according to John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, who spoke on a video call.
“This
pandemic caught the continent off guard in terms of access to health security
commodities, which are diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics,” he said. “The
continent has embraced a new public health order, that speaks to the need for
us to manufacture vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics.”
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