COVID vaccines - The African Mirror

May

2022

Making COVID vaccines in Africa: advances and sustainability issues

Author BENJAMIN KAGINA, University of Cape Town THE history of vaccine manufacturing capacity in Africa dates back to 1881 when Egypt’s Vacsera company was established. Before the COVID pandemic was declared, there were eight African countries that, to our knowledge, had a record of vaccine manufacturing facilities (see the map). They were: Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia (North Africa); Nigeria and Senegal (West Africa); Ethiopia (East Africa); and South Africa. Between them, they had 14 facilities. Few were involved from end to end (discovery, fill and finish, pack and distribute) production process. Instead, the focus was largely on the late…

Feb

2022

By The African Mirror

COVID vaccines: African countries need to fix their distribution chains

COVID-19

SUB-SAHARAN Africa still has too few vaccines for too few people. Delivering more inoculations to the region deserves top priority. But there is another hurdle to overcome to successfully deploy vaccines: the region’s poor trade and logistics quality. Logistics are a network of services that support the physical movement of goods both within and across a country’s borders. Author JONATHAN MUNEMO, Professor of Economics, Salisbury University No journey is more critical in determining the fate of a pandemic than the distance a vaccine must travel from the production line to a person’s arm. In sub-Saharan Africa, the last mile of…

Jul

2021

By The African Mirror

UK offers 817 000 vaccines to Kenya

COVID-19

BRITAIN will offer 817,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses to Kenya as part of a delivery of 9 million Oxford-AstraZeneca shots it is providing to help the world tackle the pandemic, the government said on Wednesday. The announcement came as Prime Minister Boris Johnson was due to meet Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta in Britain. The 9 million shots is the first tranche of the UK's commitment to share 100 million vaccine doses internationally by next June.

Jul

2021

By The African Mirror

Africa demands local production of vaccines

COVID-19

DUNCAN MIRIRI and GEORGE OBULUTSA GLOBAL pharmaceutical firms should license the production of COVID-19 vaccines in Africa rather than just do piecemeal contract deals, an African Union special envoy has said. AU coronavirus envoy Strive Masiyiwa was speaking a day after Pfizer and BioNTech announced a "fill and finish" deal with South Africa's Biovac Institute under which it will carry out the final stages of vaccine manufacturing where the product is processed and put into vials. Pfizer and BioNTech will handle drug substance production at their facilities in Europe. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has called the arrangement "restrictive" and said…

Jun

2021

By The African Mirror

Kenya secures $130 mln from the World Bank for COVID vaccines

BUSINESS

KENYA has secured $130 million of additional funds from the World Bank to help buy vaccines to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, the bank has announced. Like other countries around the continent, the East African nation has been hit by deadly waves of COVID-19 infections this year, forcing it to re-impose strict, partial lockdown measures. "This additional financing comes at a critical time when the Government of Kenya is making concerted efforts to contain the rising cases of COVID-19 infections," said Keith Hansen, the World Bank's country director in Kenya. The financing will help Kenya buy vaccines through an African Union…

Feb

2021

By The African Mirror

Does the world need new COVID vaccines?

NEWS

GUY FAULCONBRIDGE and KATE HOLTON It is not yet clear whether the world needs a new set of vaccines to fight different variants of the novel coronavirus but scientists are working on new ones so there is no reason for alarm, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group said yesterday. South Africa has paused a planned rollout of AstraZeneca's vaccines after data showed it gave minimal protection against mild infection among young people from the dominant variant there, stoking fears of a much longer battle with the pathogen. AstraZeneca and Oxford University aim to produce a next generation of vaccines…

Feb

2021

By The African Mirror

Coronavirus: a single ‘escape mutant’ shouldn’t render a vaccine useless

COVID-19

SEVERAL coronavirus variants have emerged in recent weeks that have got scientists worried. The variants, which were first identified in the UK (B117), South Africa (B1351) and Brazil (P1 and P2), have several mutations in the spike protein – the little projections on the surface of the virus that help it latch onto human cells. This protein is the target for all the COVID vaccines currently being rolled out. So will the vaccines protect us from these new variants? SARAH L CADDY, Clinical Research Fellow in Viral Immunology and Veterinary Surgeon, University of Cambridge Viruses are often not very good…

Jan

2021

By The African Mirror

In Senegal, lack of cold storage limits COVID vaccine options

COVID-19

CHRISTOPHE VAN DER PERRE SENEGAL does not have the capacity to store COVID-19 vaccines at ultra-low temperatures and would prefer to receive vials that can be kept for longer under ordinary refrigeration, the head of the country's vaccination programme said on Monday. A lack of cold storage means Senegal would only be able to keep vaccines developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, by China or Russia in the long term, as they do not require a deep freeze, Ousseynou Badiane told Reuters. Those being distributed by Moderna, which require storage at minus 20 degrees Celsius (-4 F), and Pfizer and…

Dec

2020

By The African Mirror

Comfort and joy over COVID vaccines collide with Christmas curbs

WORLD

ALISTAIR SMOUT CORONAVIRUS vaccine approvals have brought comfort and joy for many this Christmas but failed to halt new curbs on travel and gatherings as COVID-19 cases rise worldwide and deaths in the United States surpassed 3,000 for a third straight day. Scientists and government leaders have hailed the vaccines as a huge success in attacking the pandemic, but only once they are administered, a process likely to take months, even in the world's richest countries. More than 73.68 million people have been reported to be infected by the coronavirus globally and 1,655,424 have died, according to a Reuters tally,…