Up to 100 million doses of vaccines per year “exclusively” reserved for 55 “African Union member” countries.

This is the commitment made by the Pfizer and BioNTech laboratories to provide a wide range of supplies to the African continent where the lack of doses is slowing down immunization campaigns.

The American-German duo have joined forces with the Biovac group to produce their Covid-19 vaccine in Cape Town, South Africa from 2022, said a press release detailing this first partnership of the alliance outside Europe and North America.

The serum will be sent from the European factories of the two laboratories, which therefore retain control of the manufacture of messenger RNA, the most delicate and crucial step.

The bottling phase will be carried out in Cape Town.

The transfer of technologies and the installation of the machines necessary to take part in the manufacturing will start "immediately", according to the statement.

Only 2% of Africans fully vaccinated

"This is a crucial step to strengthen sustainable access to vaccines" and the collaboration "will allow doses to be distributed more widely to people in communities that are difficult to access, especially on the African continent", he added. commented Morena Makhoana, CEO of Biovac.

Geographical inequalities remain glaring in the face of the pandemic, with on the one hand the developed nations which have set up all-round vaccination programs, and on the other the poorest countries, far behind: 1.6% of doses administered throughout the world have been administered in Africa, which nevertheless represents 17% of the world's population.

The WHO recently estimated that only 2% of Africans, or 16 million people, were fully immune.

Currently, another vaccine against Covid-19, the single-dose Janssen from Johnson & Johnson, is being bottled at a factory in South Africa.

The issue of patent suspension

To speed up vaccination campaigns, several emerging countries and NGOs are calling for the suspension of patents in order to allow mass production. Washington and Paris are in favor, unlike Germany, which prefers, like BioNTech, production agreements. "Weakening intellectual property will in fact only discourage innovation," said the boss of the American laboratory, Albert Bourla, according to the text, sent to the media, of a speech planned at the WTO. “None of the challenges to ensuring equitable distribution of the vaccine come from patents,” he says.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, spearheading this fight for the temporary lifting of intellectual property, wants to make his country a center for the production of messenger RNA vaccines.

"We can see that we cannot count on vaccines which are manufactured outside Africa because they never come", he explained at the end of June at the launch of a "technology transfer center" for anti-Covid messenger RNA vaccines - the first step to endow the continent with its own production capacity.

Too late to deal with the Delta variant

Before production on site, which will arrive too late to react to the current rise in cases, against the backdrop of the spread of the Delta variant, Africa depends mainly on the international Covax mechanism and on donations, which arrive in small quantities.

As of July 20, the Covax system, which was supposed to guarantee disadvantaged countries fair access to anti-Covid vaccines, had distributed more than 135 million doses in 136 countries.

Pfizer and BioNTech will for their part "continue to evaluate" the options to expand the production network, especially in Latin America, explained Albert Bourla.

“We aim to enable production and distribution of our vaccine on all continents,” added Ugur Sahin, co-founder and director of BioNTech.

More than a billion doses have so far been delivered to more than 100 countries or territories.

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