Moderna aims to launch mRNA vaccine factory in Africa

Moderna is planning to invest $500 million in Africa to build an mRNA vaccine factory to make 500 million doses each year to reduce the vaccine pressure. Pressure is constantly growing on the pharmaceutical industry due to the Covid-19 and manufacturing the drugs in a continent helps to reduce that pressure.

African countries and World Health Organization (WHO) has been urging drugmakers to set the vaccine plants at a continent to secure the vaccine supply need. Till today, only 4.5 percent of Africans are fully vaccinated as per public health official, John Nkengasong.

Moderna’s site will also include the bottling and the packaging facility. The country and the location will be decided later as per the company sources. “We expect to manufacture our Covid-19 vaccine as well as additional products within our mRNA vaccine portfolio at this facility,” CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement.

The African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s director, Nkengasong, claimed he had not seen the Moderna statement and that the firm had not consulted him about this. He welcomes any attempts to address the continent’s medium- to long-term needs at a press conference but said Moderna’s proposals will not solve the continent’s current challenges procuring COVID-19 vaccine doses.

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This debate of setting a factory comes in the spotlight after the drugmakers and governments urge to settle the needs the vaccine shots in developing countries and this movement will definitely help to end the pandemic. This time, rich nations should come forward as they have already secured their need of vaccine supply at first and now, they should help developing nations to end this pandemic. The US has stated that it will support it, but pharmaceutical companies have raised objections on certain things, claiming that due to the complexity of the production process, they must monitor any technology transfer.

South Africa, Rwanda, and Senegal are among the countries that could host Moderna’s African factory, according to health experts, however, a senior South African official involved in an effort to promote local vaccine manufacture claimed he was unaware of the Moderna statement. The South African Ministry of Health did not respond to a request for comment. In July, Pfizer (PFE.N) and BioNTech (22UAy.DE) agreed to help South Africa’s Biovac produce roughly 100 million doses of their COVID-19 vaccine for Africa. BioNTech said in August that it was looking at using mRNA technology to build malaria and tuberculosis vaccine production plants in Rwanda and Senegal.

Moderna, on the other hand, is the first company to plan a manufacturing plant on the continent. It has so far distributed over 500 million doses of its Covid-19 vaccine. CEO Bancel stated that the company hopes to “expand Moderna’s societal influence” by investing in a “state-of-the-art mRNA manufacturing facility.”

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The WHO has been trying its best to convince Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech to establish their manufacturing units in Africa and establish the African tech transfer centre. However, a senior WHO official told Reuters last month that talks with Moderna had made little progress.

Nkengasong expressed the hope that Moderna would collaborate with the Partnerships for African Vaccine Manufacturing programme, which was formed earlier this year and looks at Africa’s requirements on a continental basis. “Ten countries in Africa have expressed an interest in vaccine manufacturing, (we) can actually bring them all together and put Moderna at the centre of that. … That would really speak to the need to be transparent and also … coordinate our efforts,” he said.

After concerns of possible rare cardiovascular side effects and data from an unpublished Nordic study, Sweden and Denmark halted the use of Moderna’s vaccine for younger age groups on Wednesday. On Wednesday, the company’s stock dropped 9%.