The institute "has a certain expertise in the domain of vaccine development,” said Dr. Scientists there have been manufacturing them for decades. It’s not always within reach or easily found in Africa because it’s new technology.”īut the institute already produces yellow fever vaccines. “It requires a level of human resources and skills that are extremely high as well. “The standards are indeed getting higher and higher,” said Antoine Diatta, the vaccine quality control manager at the Pasteur Institute. To repeat the process in a low-income country would be a massive accomplishment. Producing vaccines is already a tall task under the best of circumstances, because it requires a great deal of capital and technological prowess. “The whole philosophy that we have here is really to make sure that Africa becomes self-sufficient by building vaccines in Africa for Africa,” Sall said. Doses would be distributed throughout West Africa and perhaps even the entire continent. The institute hopes to manufacture vaccines not just for the next pandemic, but also for endemic diseases such as measles and polio.
The new facility is scheduled to open later this year and produce 300 million COVID doses annually.įILE - A health worker administers a dose of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine at Dakar's Medina neighborhood, Senegal, July 28, 2021. Having a different level of protection in different parts of the world won’t help control and end this pandemic.”Īfrica currently imports 99 percent of all its vaccines. “The need to make sure that we have control over our supply is something that is critically important in terms of health security. “Africa has been somehow left a little bit behind when it comes to supply of vaccines,” said Amadou Sall, the director of the Pasteur Institute. The institute has partnered with BioNTech to build a production facility for its mRNA vaccines. Last week, scientists in South Africa announced they had successfully made a copy of the Moderna vaccine, and a new initiative at the Pasteur Institute in Dakar is on a similar track. CDC, and 85% in Britain, according to the U.K.’s government’s coronavirus dashboard.īut scientists are aiming to change that. Today, 11% of Africans are fully vaccinated, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compared with 64% in the U.S, according to the U.S. Since then, supplies repeatedly have run dry in Senegal and other African countries that have relied on the international community for the vaccines. Senegal administered its first doses to the public in March 2021, months after COVID-19 vaccines had become available in the West. A new initiative in Senegal, however, hopes to reduce that inequity and make the continent more vaccine self-sufficient.
Nonetheless, AstraZeneca is the biggest supplier to the developing world, bar China, and is now playing the central role in COVAX's distribution of vaccines to African and other poorer countries.The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed stark vaccine inequities among high- and low-income nations and has underscored Africa's dependence on outside countries for shots. Pfizer/BoNTech took the lead in January with by some distance the largest monthly output, which has also propelled it ahead of AstraZeneca and the two Chinese giants in terms of total output to date. The Chinese firm Walvax has an mRNA vaccine now in a third phase clinical trial, which could if successful be much needed given concerns about the efficacy of the dominant Sinovac and Sinopharm inactivated virus jabs. Total global output of 729.6 million doses was less than half the 1.59 billion made in December, largely thanks to that Chinese shutdown.
The United States, the third biggest production location, held steady at 148 million doses versus 144.8 million last month. India nonetheless showed a healthy increase for both the AstraZeneca vaccine (145.9 million) and that from Bharat (50 million). Vaccine production slowed down sharply in both the biggest producing regions, with Chinese output merely 45 million doses against 665.8 million in December, and the European Union dropping from 432.9 million doses to 235 million. COVID-19 vaccine production, to January 31st 2022
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