Aspen, the South African based pharmaceutical company licensed to produce the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, has not yet received a single order from the African continent and might close its COVID vaccine production line.
This was disclosed by Dr John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, at a media briefing on Thursday at which he appealed to African countries, COVAX and Gavi to “rally around” Aspen to protect vaccine production on the continent.
It was “shortsighted” of African countries to rely on vaccine donations at the expense of the continent’s vaccine manufacturing capacity, Nkengasong told the briefing.
“There is a global consensus that, in order to ensure global health security, there must be regional vaccine manufacturing capacity. Here we are with a company that is producing an amazing vaccine that the continent is using that is running a risk of shutting down that production. We cannot and must not allow that to happen,” he stressed.
“If we only rely on donor vaccines and do not invest in and promote our own facilities on the continent that is a recipe for going backwards the next time we are hit with another pandemic.”
Africa has not cancelled orders
At a media briefing of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) on Wednesday, Pfizer CEO Dr Albert Bourla said that the US had been unable to donate 800 million Pfizer doses to Africa as the continent lacks the capacity to use them.
In addition, IFPMA Director General Thomas Cueni claimed that the Africa CDC, which coordinates much of the continent’s COVID-19 vaccine orders, had “stopped” and even “cancelled” orders because of African countries’ inability to roll out vaccination programmes.
However, Nkengasong said this was not the case. The continent had simply asked companies and donors to coordinate efforts to ensure that millions of doses are not delivered to the continent at the same time.
Huge volumes of doses have been lined up for delivery during the first quarter of the year, exposing African countries to the potential of having to dispose of expired stock if they could not get them out fast enough, he added. Kenya has, for example, recently destroyed 800,000 unused and expired vaccines.
“It is not because some parts of the world have now finished vaccinating and they have access that they donate in Africa that Africa will be ready to use all those vaccines at the same time,” said Nkengasong. “It must be coordinated, it must be done as a programme.”
He stressed that “even if you are a developed country and vaccines suddenly show up on your border in abundance, you run the risk of not using those vaccines appropriately”.
Nkengasong also appealed to the global community to invest the same energy it had in getting vaccines to ensuring that these “got into arms” by supporting the transport, storage, and human resources needed to vaccinate people, as well as accessories such as needles and syringes.
African Union launches youth vaccination drive
Nkengasong said that African countries should still aim to vaccinate 70% of their citizens by the third quarter of the year.
“We should not be deceived that because we are in a low transmission season in Africa and across the world that we will not see a pandemic rebound. We’ve seen this scenario over and over,” he stressed.
Africa CDC’s data showed a consistent pattern of low transmission seasons, usually lasting between two and three months, followed by COVID-19 outbreaks, he added.
“We’ve seen this four times,” said Nkengasong.
A week ago, the African Union launched the Vaccination Bingwa Initative aimed at encouraging young people to get vaccinated.
The initiative seeks to establish a network of COVID-19 vaccination youth champions (bingwa means champion in Swahili) across the continent to accelerate the uptake of coronavirus vaccination in Africa.
