South Africa inaugurates first anti-covid vaccine manufacturing plant

South Africa, spearhead in the fight for equality in terms of access to anti-COVID vaccines, inaugurated this Wednesday in Cape Town the first plant on the continent that will manufacture all kinds of serums, financed by biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong.

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

The development of second-generation vaccines is aimed, in particular, at palliate the loss of effectiveness over time of the first, but also 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 together with the 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 in the entire continent there are 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 vaccination of nearly 1.2 billion Africans remains 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 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 Johnson & Johnson in Gqeberha (south).

Soon-Shiong made his fortune on a cancer drug called Abraxane. He is also a shareholder of the American basketball team Los Angeles Lakers. (I)