Moderna plans African vaccine factory

Moderna has unveiled plans to build a vaccine production plant in Africa that could help alleviate a burden off the shoulders of the states of developing countries who have thus far seen lacklustre support from developed nations against the Covid-19 pandemic.

The company is reportedly investing around $500 million into the factory with the potential to roll out 500 million vaccines each year.

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Site selection is expected to begin soon. Therefore, it is currently unknown which country the plant will be located in.

Both the pharmaceutical sector and governments in the developed world have received backlash since the rollout of jabs began about the deployment of vaccines in developing nations, such as those found in Africa or parts of Asia and South America.

Countries such as Canada, the UK and the US have been accused of "hoarding vaccines" while the EU made plans to tackle the vaccine crisis on a global level - raising €7.5 billion to deal with the issue - but its own vaccine shortfalls appear to have hollowed these ambitions.

US President Joe Biden revealed plans to waive intellectual property rights on vaccines to potentially increase rollout in developing nations, something which vaccine manufacturers such as Moderna fiercely opposed.

Moderna revealed it would be planning to roll out its mRNA vaccine on the continent, with the potential to also introduce new, experimental jabs that have not yet reached late-stage clinical trials.

Africa has some of the lowest levels of inoculation in the world. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that only fifteen countries - around one-third of the nations on the continent - have not inoculated even 10% of their population, whereas nations such as Morocco and Tunisia have vaccinated more than 40%. 

However, over half of the nations in Africa have vaccinated fewer than 2% of their populations.

Moderna's vaccine was one of the first rolled out to deal with the pandemic, approved for use in the EU just days after the AstraZeneca vaccine was rolled out in the UK.

Read more: AstraZeneca and Oxford Covid vaccine approved for UK rollout

However, the company is still looking to expand its capacity to deal with the pandemic in 2022 and beyond, according to the firm's CEO Stephane Bancel.

"We view Moderna’s work as only just beginning", he revealed in a statement, adding that Moderna has "been humbled to play a critical role in combatting the COVID-19 pandemic globally with our mRNA vaccine."

The company claims it has rolled out more than 500 million doses globally to date.

Moderna's vaccine, like many of the jabs on the market, has seen updates in order to battle new strains of the virus that have cropped up since it was first discovered in late 2019.

The company is apparently not the first major vaccine maker to consider setting up shop in Africa.

The Financial Times reports that Pfizer entered talks with the governments of Senegal and Rwanda in August to attempt to establish a partnership to aid in the rollout, which they had planned for next year.

However, Moderna is the first pharmaceutical company to plan a full-scale RNA factory on the continent, which could produce the active ingredient in the jab.

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