GENEVA
\nSix African countries have been chosen to establish their own mRNA vaccine production, the World Health Organization said Friday, with the continent largely shut out of access to Covid jabs.
\nEgypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia were selected as the first recipients of technology from the WHO\u2019s global mRNA vaccine hub, in a push to ensure Africa can make its own jabs to fight the Covid and other diseases.
\n\u201cNo other event like the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that reliance on a few companies to supply global public goods is limiting, and dangerous,\u201d WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
\n\u201cThe best way to address health emergencies and reach universal health coverage is to significantly increase the capacity of all regions to manufacture the health products they need.\u201d
\nTedros has continually called for equitable access to vaccines in order to beat the pandemic, and rails against the way wealthy nations have hogged doses, leaving Africa lagging behind other continents in the global vaccination effort.
\nA ceremony marking the mRNA tech transfer announcement was to be held Friday in Brussels at the summit between the European Union and the African Union.
\nEuropean Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said: \u201cWe have been talking a lot about producing mRNA vaccines in Africa. But this goes even beyond. This is mRNA technology designed in Africa, led by Africa and owned by Africa.\u201d
\nCurrently only one percent of the vaccines used in Africa are produced on the continent of some 1.3 billion people.
\nThe WHO set up a global mRNA technology transfer hub in South Africa last year to support manufacturers in low- and middle-income countries to produce their own vaccines.
\nThe global hub\u2019s role is to ensure that manufacturers in those nations have the know-how to make mRNA vaccines at scale and according to international standards.
\nAs used in the Pfizer\/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines, mRNA technology provokes an immune response by delivering genetic molecules containing the code for key parts of a pathogen into human cells.
\nPrimarily set up to address the Covid-19 pandemic, the global hub has the potential to expand manufacturing capacity for other vaccines and products, such as insulin to treat diabetes, cancer medicines and, potentially, vaccines for diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV.
\nThe scheme\u2019s ultimate goal is to spread capacity for national and regional production to all health technologies.
\nThe WHO said it would work with the first six countries chosen to develop a roadmap of training and support so they can start producing vaccines as soon as possible. Training will begin in March.
\nThe South African hub is already producing mRNA vaccines at laboratory scale and is currently scaling up toward commercial scale.
\nSouth African President Cyril Ramaphosa said Friday\u2019s announcement \u201cmeans mutual respect, mutual recognition of what we can all bring to the party, investment in our economies, infrastructure investment and, in many ways, giving back to the continent.\u201d
\nFrench President Emmanuel Macron said supporting African health sovereignty was one of the key goals of starting up local production, \u201cto empower regions and countries to fend for themselves, during crises, and in peace time.\u201d
\nMore than 10.4 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses have been administered around the world, with nearly 62 percent of the global population having received at least one shot.
\nHowever, just 11.3 percent of Africans had been fully immunized by the start of February.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
GENEVA Six African countries have been chosen to establish their own mRNA vaccine production, the World Health Organization said Friday, with the continent largely shut out of access to Covid jabs. Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia were selected as the first recipients of technology from the WHO\u2019s global mRNA vaccine hub, in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-245271","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n