Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, March 23, 2021 (ECA) - Africa has the capacity to produce its own coronavirus vaccines but political will and infrastructural investments are needed in helping finance the lifesaving injections to stop the pandemic, experts have urged.
Speaking at an Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) high-level panel discussion on whether Africa was ready to finance its own vaccines, leading experts felt that Africa needed strong political will and all round infrastructure to successfully roll out its own vaccines.
World Health Organisation Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told the panel that the development of vaccines in record time in response to COVID-19 had given the world reason for hope but the hope must be for all.
“No country can vaccinate its way out of the pandemic not even the wealthy ones,” Dr. Ghebreyesus emphasized, warning that as long as the virus was circulating, it would mutate. Equitable vaccine distribution the only sure way to stop it.
“Even with the vaccines, we still have a long road ahead,” he said, warning that COVID-19 had destroyed economies, disrupted trade, travel and tourism, leaving import-reliant African countries exposed.
Citing the World Bank, Dr. Ghebreyesus noted that for every month that vaccines were delayed in reaching Africa, $13.8 billion was lost in GDP.
“The fastest way to get economies on track is vaccine equity,” he said, adding, “Ultimately Africa needs to be able to meet its own needs for vaccines and other essential products. That means financing local manufacturing capacity, comprehensive regulation and sustainable supply chains.”
Dr. Ghebreyesus noted that vaccines production needed to be scaled-up in countries where they are being produced with pharmaceutical companies being asked to share intellectual property rights, data and know-how in the manufacture of vaccines with Africa.
The WHO has established the COVID Technology Access Pool, known as CTAP to accelerate the development of products, including vaccines to fight COVID-19.
The pandemic has underscored the critical gap in vaccine manufacturing in Africa which represents 26 percent of the world’s population but has less than 0.1 percent of world vaccines production.
“Ultimately the lesson we can learn from this pandemic is that health is not a luxury but a fundamental human right and the foundation of social and political stability,” the WHO Chief said.
Dr. Ghebreyesus called on African countries to ratify the treaty establishing the African Medicines Agency (AMA) to regulate manufacturing of home-grown medical products, in addition to supporting a proposal by South Africa and India for Intellectual Property rights waiver at the World Trade Organisation.
“We are one year with this global pandemic and vaccine apartheid is unfolding before us,” bemoaned Winnie Byanyima, the Executive Director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). She said a year on, there was no global plan to get COVID-19 vaccines to everyone and to end the pandemic, yet 25 years ago the world acted on ending HIV/AIDS.
“Rich countries are vaccinating people at a rate of one person per second yet the majority of developing countries have not administered even one dose. As of last week less than one percent of Africans had received vaccines and most of these were in one country.”
Ms. Byanyima regretted that Africa’s ambition to vaccinate 60 percent of its population to achieve herd immunity was not handled at the global level. Rich countries and big pharmaceuticals were not sharing the vaccine know-how while African countries were paying double the price for vaccines than rich countries.
Responding to questions of sharing intellectual property, Susan Silbermann, the Global COVID-19 Task Force Leader and President of Pfizer Vaccines, said Pfizer was ready to work with Africa. It has laid out a plan to share expertise, data and tools publicly in drug development and in manufacturing capacities.
“There are lot of questions about intellectual property, about manufacturing capabilities, about building facilities,” Ms. Silbermann explained. “These things take time. There is not a magic wand, there is not a snapping of the finger. There is not a writing of a big check that it can allow anyone anywhere in the world to do the kind of manufacturing that is required for vaccines such as the one Pfizer has developed.”
Stavros Nocolaou, the Senior Executive responsible for Strategic Trade at global pharmaceutical company, Aspen, said the best economic recovery plan for any country was to ramp up vaccinations to achieve desired herd immunity. He called for long term planning to invest in capacity building and skills. Key to this was for Africa to identify its strengths and to select the right partners to tap into local resources and knowledge.
Africa is ready to produce vaccines because it has produced vaccines for other diseases, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC)Director, Dr. John Nkengasong said.
“We know that vaccines are the fundamental underpinning of the health security on the continent and we have to invest in that,” Dr. Nkengasong said, adding that, “If we do not do this we will move towards the endemicity of this virus on the continent and will have devastating effects going forward.”
Benedict Oramah, President of the Africa-Export Bank (Afreximbank), said Africa had no choice but to invest in developing its own vaccines. The Bank has provided a $2 billion funding for the purchase of 270 million doses of vaccines. Africa needs more than $6 billion to procure vaccines to complement the COVAX facility.
Mr. Omarah said Africa should support its own institutions to finance the development of its own vaccines.
Drawing lessons from the experience of dealing with the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, Francis Kaikai, the Minister of Planning and Economic Development, noted the importance of rolling out vaccines on time and planning for the long term.
“There has been some reticence in the acceptance of the vaccines. We need to do public education campaigns to deal with misinformation and disinformation especially in rural areas,” Mr. Kaikai urged.
His counterpart from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has also been hit by the Ebola virus and now COVID-19 with the rest of the continent, Sele Yalaghuli, said bilateral agreements were needed to help Africa procure vaccines.
Dr. Amadou Sall, Chief Executive Officer of the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal, said urgency was required to solve the pandemic and scale-up the roll out of vaccines. The Institut Pasteur conducted the first COVID test kit in Africa and isolated the virus for the yellow fever and developed a vaccine for it within ten years.
He told the panel that a coordinated approach was key in vaccine research and development, in addition to good partnerships and having a distribution network to reduce commercial barriers as well as having robust regulations.
“We have the possibility to produce this vaccine on the continent and we could build a new public health order,” said Dr. Sall.
The panel agreed that bolstering capacity in Africa to manufacture COVID-19 vaccines would go a long towards helping the continent’s recovery.
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