A Step Toward Africa ’s First Covid-19 Vaccine of Its Own

While most health care workers in the wealthy world were vaccinated early in 2021, only a quarter of Africa’s health workers had received their Covid-19 jabs at the end of last year. Credit: UNICEF/Nahom Tesfaye By Akshaya KumarNEW YORK, Feb 16 2022 (IPS) Efforts to combat the vast global inequity in access to Covid-19 vaccines just got a boost. A Cape Town company claims it successfully made a vaccine that mimics Moderna’s messenger RNA vaccine—without any help from Moderna. This copycat will still need to undergo clinical trials, but the effort could yield Africa’s first Covid-19 vaccine. So far, African factories have been cut out of the effort to manufacture Covid-19 vaccines and largely limited to filling and labelling bottles with the drug substance manufactured elsewhere. As a result, when vaccines were in short supply globally, Africans were forced to wait. When they did arrive, vaccines were often dumped on overburdened public health systems with very short notice, in some cases, close to their expiration date. Strive Masiyiwa, the African Union Special Envoy to the African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team and a prominent businessman, described his experience seeking to buy vaccines on behalf of the continent, “I met all the manufacturers in December (2020), and said, we would like to buy some vaccines. We had money, we were willing to pay up front in cash. We were not asking for donations, and they said all capacity for 2021 has been sold…. the people who b...
Source: IPS Inter Press Service - Health - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Tags: Africa Headlines Health Inequality TerraViva United Nations Source Type: news