Africa-Press – South-Africa. South Africa’s Biovac Institute won funding from the European Investment Bank and the International Finance Corporation to expand its vaccine facility in Cape Town that will be the continent’s biggest once completed.
The partly state-owned company will receive €75 million (R1.45 billion) from the EIB in the form of a “quasi-equity” investment and a $20 million loan led by the IFC to build the plant, the firm and the funders said in a joint statement on Thursday.
The plant will cost a total of $180 million, Biovac Chief Executive Officer Morena Makhoana said by text message.
Biovac is “building Africa’s first facility that can manufacture, at scale, multiple vaccines from beginning to end, without needing the active pharmaceutical ingredient from abroad,” the parties said.
“The facility will be completed by 2028 and will eventually produce more than 400 million doses of multiple vaccines.”
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, when African countries struggled to import the vaccines they needed because of demand from from richer nations, there’s has been a drive for the continent to build its own capacity to cut reliance on imports.
The plant will initially produce oral cholera vaccines and later make inoculations for polio, meningitis and pneumonia. The project is expected to create more than 340 direct jobs and 7,000 indirect positions, they said.
The production of as many 40 million cholera vaccines annually will meet 40% of the “global cholera vaccine-supply gap” and Biovac will seek to supply the United Nations Childrens Fund and GAVI, the vaccine alliance, they said.
The few vaccine plants in Africa mostly operate on a so-called fill-and-finish basis, whereby they package inoculations using imported pharmaceutical material.
South Africa and Senegal are the only nations on the continent with capacity to make them from start to finish. Currently less than 1% of the world’s vaccines are made in Africa.
Biovac has worked with Pfizer and BioNtech to make Covid-19 inoculations and with Sanofi Pasteur to make a pediatric vaccine under license.
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