South Africa hails new COVID jab plant in fight for self-reliance | Coronavirus pandemi... - 0 views
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On January 19, at a cavernous warehouse on an industrial estate in Cape Town, South African-born billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong launched a project he believes will be a considerable step in Africa’s struggle for vaccine equity.
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He hopes the facility, which will be run by NantSA, a company he established last year, may be able to produce as many as a billion doses per year by 2025.
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The continent imports some 99 percent of the vaccines it consumes annually, according to the World Health Organization, making it vulnerable to global shortages.
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At the opening of the plant, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa evoked the language of the independence movement as he spoke of the need to “shed those colonial chains” and become self-sufficient. “Africa should no longer go cap in hand to the Western world begging and begging for vaccines” he announced. “Africa should no longer be last in line.”
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Now, spurred by the pandemic, Africa’s small but growing biotechnology sector is racing to catch up.
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Africa remains the world’s least vaccinated continent, with barely 10 percent of its 1.3 billion inhabitants fully inoculated against the disease. Vaccine hesitancy has played a part, but Kagina says lack of access to vaccines is also a major factor. Since the first COVID-19 vaccines were approved in December 2020 there has been glaring inequity in the way they have been distributed.
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Meanwhile, the African Union-sponsored Partnership for African Vaccine Manufacturing has brought together key stakeholders from across the continent to help streamline efforts. But Cape Town has emerged as something of a continental hub of COVID vaccine production.