Africa: Sharing technology and supporting innovation is not just about equity. It´s also the best way to stop pandemics

Geneva — Inequity has plagued the responses to harmful pathogens. Take Covid-19: an unprecedented 11.9 billion vaccine doses have been administered worldwide, helping many countries turn the tide on the pandemic. Yet more than 80% of people in Africa have not received one dose, some 18 months since the first person was vaccinated. As long as this gap exists, we can’t protect the world against new virus variants and end the acute stage of this pandemic.

Thanks to groundbreaking innovation, effective vaccines were developed in record time to protect against Covid-19. However, at the outset of the vaccination drive, a concentration of vaccine and other health technology production was seen in a few, mostly rich, countries. Poorer nations ended up at the back of the queue. The situation has since changed, with global supply exceeding global demand. The international community, led through the ACT-Accelerator and its COVAX facility, have played a crucial role to this end, confirming the response to scourges like COVID-19 requires ample preparedness and new ways of working in order to protect public health.

The acute stage of the Covid19 pandemic will persist worldwide until investment in equity is valued over profits.

Now, the central challenges are how to ensure vaccines remain effective, boost the capacities of national public health systems to administer doses and increase vaccine uptake, and counter the pervasive winds of misinformation that fan vaccine hesitancy.

An obvious lesson of this pandemic is that we must expand the local and regional production of vaccines and other essential health products in low and middle-income countries. This will allow for both direct access to vaccines, as well as the development of local ecosystems of vaccine production. It will make supply in the event of the next crisis more reliable and more equitable, as long as global supply chains are not interrupted.

The World Health Organization (WHO), the African Union, the European Union, the Governments of South Africa, Rwanda, Senegal, Germany and France, and partners, are working to help industry and partners scale up local vaccine production and improve global and regional collaboration to prevent and respond to future pandemics. Investing collectively to ensure all regions of the world have state-of-the-art production infrastructure, trained personnel and institutional and regulatory arrangements is a valuable asset for our common health security.

WHO is supporting a multilateral effort to create and spread mRNA technology in developing countries.

One year ago, WHO, South Africa and the Medicines Patent Pool established a technology transfer hub for mRNA vaccines in Cape Town[1], supported by EU, France, Germany and other local and international partners. The hub’s goal is to spread this technology to developing countries by training and licensing manufacturers to produce their own vaccines for national and regional use.

With donor support, the hub is already producing results. Scientists have designed a new mRNA vaccine based on publicly available information. Local manufacturers from Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe have been selected to receive the technology. Partners at the Medicines Patent Pool are ready to help license technologies. A new initiative of the African Development Bank, the African Pharmaceutical Technology Foundation (APTF), may also contribute.

Parts of the private sector are also stepping up. The recent groundbreaking ceremony in Rwanda of the first mRNA production facility in Africa, built by the German company BioNTech, is another example of the efforts by African countries to work with partners to become more resilient in the face of pandemics. Similar facilities are planned in Senegal, collaborating with Ghana for fill-and-finish services [to package imported vaccines].

A wide array of diseases can be tackled by new technologies, dispersed around the world.

The mRNA technology is not just for fighting COVID-19. It can be adapted to tackle other diseases, like HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and leishmaniasis, putting countries in the driver’s seat to produce the tools required to meet their health needs.

At a recent summit in Kigali, BioNTech committed to completing its malaria vaccine programme and manufacture any licensed product in Africa. The WHO mRNA Hub programme in South Africa already has its eyes on developing a broad suite of vaccines and other products to tackle disease threats, such as insulin to treat diabetes, cancer medicines and, potentially, vaccines for other priority diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV.

Building vaccine production facilities are hard, but ensuring their sustainability is even harder.

Required: training, strong regulations, partnerships, combatting mis-information and sharing.

First, there is the need to strengthen workforce capacity by providing dedicated training for staff working at these facilities. WHO is addressing this gap through a biomanufacturing training hub in the Republic of Korea, operating under the framework of the WHO Academy, based in Lyon, France, to help developing countries produce not just vaccines, but also insulin, monoclonal antibodies, and cancer treatments. Rwanda has recently launched the African Biomanufacturing Institute (ABI), an innovative structure bringing together industry training providers and universities to train the local workforce.

Second, producing health products requires strong regulatory capacities to ensure quality standards and approve final products. WHO and partners are investing in strengthening regulatory bodies across Africa and beyond. The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the African Union Development Agency have been working with regulators on the continent, and in high-income countries, to increase their capacity. And the African Medicines Agency (AMA), to be headquartered in Rwanda, has entered into force, and will become Africa’s continental medicines regulator.

Stronger regulatory agencies in developing countries will also enhance confidence in locally produced products and counter misinformation and the availability of unsafe counterfeit medicines.

Third, new production facilities will rely heavily on a sustainable, and competitive, market environment where suppliers of vaccines and other new pharmaceutical products will be ready to purchase these life-saving tools. We recognize the need for current and future African vaccine producing countries to access vaccines procurement platforms, such as GAVI, among others. Market-shaping strategies at regional and continental level, as outlined by the Partnership for African Vaccine Manufacturing, can ensure the sustainability of ongoing efforts, with leading market shaping agencies and partners, such as Unitaid, standing ready to support. G7 leaders have also taken up this issue and asked relevant international actors to work on a joint market shaping strategy.