Africa-Press – Uganda. Industries manufacturing vaccines should be flexible to be able to produce other vaccines to cure new pandemics, a senior Ministry of Health official has said.
Dr Moses Seru, the commissioner of Pharmaceuticals and Natural Medicines, said some Covid-19 manufacturing industries are now underutilised because the virus is no longer a global threat like it was two years ago.
“When Covid-19 hit, many scientists started manufacturing vaccines. We now have more vaccines of Covid-19 world-wide because Covid is now not a big global threat,” Dr Seru said during a two-day regional conference on vaccine manufacturing in Entebbe on Tuesday.
“Going forward, industries manufacturing vaccines should be able to change the manufacturing to other vaccines should that particular pandemic end,” he added.
After Covid-19 started causing numerous deaths, several industries, including Pfizer and BioNTech, came together in a race against the virus, working to design, test, manufacture, and distribute a safe and efficacious vaccine in record time.
This saw the United Kingdom produce Oxford-AstraZeneca, United States and Germany produce Pfizer-BioNTech, United States and India produce Baylor and Biological E, among others.
Speaking at the same event, Dr Moses Mulumba, the director general of Afya na Haki (Ahaki), an African Institute that generates knowledge and builds advocacy capacities, decried the few industries in Africa that manufacture vaccines.
“Africa, a continent of 54 countries with more than 1.2 billion people, produces only 1 percent of the vaccines it administers. The remaining 99 percent are imported. Most come from international procurement mechanisms, such as one organised through the united Nations Children’s charity Unicef,” Dr Mulumba said.
“Africa’s vaccine manufacturing capacity does not match the severity of its vaccine-preventable diseases burden. With the inability to produce its own, Africa has ended up at the back of the queue for lifesaving vaccines like the coronavirus jabs where less than 12 percent of the African population is fully-vaccinated compared with 71 percent of the population in Europe,” he added.
Until recently, there were only 10 vaccine manufacturers across African countries with Egypt, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa, and Tunisia jointly producing a tiny fraction of the continent’s needs.
Likewise, only three countries have reached the maturity level for vaccine status since 2021, namely South Africa, Egypt, and Ghana.
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