Financed by a billionaire, South Africa inaugurates the continent’s first anti-covid vaccine plant

South Africa, spearhead in the fight for equality in terms of access to anticovid vaccines, opened this Wednesday in Cape Town the first plant on the continent that will manufacture all kinds of serums, financed by biotechnology billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, who made his fortune thanks to a cancer drug called Abraxane. He is also a shareholder of the American basketball team Los Angeles Lakers.

The objective is the development of “a second generation vaccine, and we want make it in Africa, for Africa, and export it to the rest of the world,” said the South African-born, Chinese-American businessman. The first vaccines will be produced this year, and the site is expected to reach one billion doses a year by 2025.

The development of second-generation vaccines is intended, in particular, to alleviate the loss of efficacy of the first-generation ones over time, but also to combat the eventual appearance of new variants of the coronavirus.

“Today we show that we are becoming self-sufficient in both continents and we should be proud of what we are achieving,” he said at the opening ceremony alongside South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.

South Africa is the most affected country on the continent by covid-19, registering more than 3.5 million cases and 93,400 deaths. While the entire continent accounts for more than 10 million cases, according to data from the African Union (AU).

Infections have skyrocketed after the appearance of the omicron variant, precisely in South Africa at the end of November.

But the vaccination of nearly 1.2 billion Africans continues to be low and slow, due to supply difficulties and the skepticism of a large part of its population. And, the continent produces less than 1% of the vaccines inoculated throughout its territory, according to data from the World Health Organization (WHO).

At the end of 2020, South Africa and India proposed to the World Trade Organization (WTO) a suspension of the intellectual property rights for treatments and vaccines against covid-19. Numerous NGOs and states followed suit.

This matter, which returned to the agenda of the WTO conference, scheduled for November but postponed due to the omicron variant, has not yet had a solution.

South Africa has two laboratories that manufacture and package anti-Covid vaccines: the Biovac Institute, also in Cape Town, would begin to do so from the beginning of this year with the Pfizer-BioNTech serum, and the pharmaceutical giant Aspen conditions the one from Johnson & Johnson in Gqeberha (south).

.

We would love to give thanks to the writer of this post for this outstanding web content

Financed by a billionaire, South Africa inaugurates the continent’s first anti-covid vaccine plant