Six African countries have been selected to create mRNA vaccine production centers on the continent, which has limited access to anti-covid doses, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Friday.
Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia will be the first to receive the technology from the WHO’s global messenger RNA vaccine hub, a move to ensure the continent has enough vaccines to fight the pandemic and other future diseases. .
“No other event like the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that reliance on some companies to provide global public goods is dangerous,” said WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
“The best way to address health emergencies and achieve universal health coverage is to significantly increase the capacity of all regions to produce the necessary products,” he added.
The director of the WHO insistently called for equal access to vaccines to end the pandemic and criticized rich countries that stockpiled doses, leaving Africa far from the necessary percentage of immunization.
Currently, 1% of vaccines applied in Africa are produced in the continent of 1.3 billion inhabitants.
The WHO last year installed a messenger RNA technology center in South Africa to support the production of vaccines by manufacturers in low- and middle-income countries, as well as ensuring that they have access to knowledge about the technique.
Used in Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s anti-covid vaccines, mRNA technology triggers an immune response by delivering genetic molecules to human cells that contain the code for key parts of the pathogen.
Although it was initially conceived to fight the covid-19 pandemic, this center can expand its capacity to manufacture other products in the health sector, such as insulin, cancer drugs or vaccines against malaria, tuberculosis or AIDS.
WHO said it will work with the six selected countries to plan a training and support program so they can start producing vaccines as soon as possible. This training will begin in March.
The South African center is already producing mRNA vaccines on a laboratory scale and is scaling up to commercial scale.
More than 10.4 billion anti-covid vaccines have been administered worldwide, with almost 62% of the population having at least one dose. But in Africa, only 11.3% of the population was immunized at the beginning of February.
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