The fight against harmful pathogens has always been characterized by injustice.

This is also the case with COVID-19: 11.9 billion doses of vaccine have been administered worldwide - an unprecedented number - which has helped many countries to get the pandemic under control.

But in Africa, more than 80% of the population is still unvaccinated - a year and a half after the first human was vaccinated.

Until this gap is closed, we can neither protect the world from new virus variants nor end the acute phase of this pandemic.

Thanks to breakthrough innovations, effective vaccines to protect against COVID-19 have been developed in record time.

However, at the beginning of the vaccination campaign, the production of vaccines and other health technologies was concentrated in a few, mostly wealthy countries.

Poorer countries had to queue at the back.

The situation has since changed: global supply now exceeds global demand.

The international community has made a significant contribution through the ACT Accelerator and the COVAX platform.

It has been shown that the fight against diseases like COVID-19 requires comprehensive preparedness and new approaches so that the health care system is not compromised.

The key challenges now are to continue to ensure vaccine effectiveness, to strengthen national health systems' capacities to administer vaccines and increase immunization coverage, and to counteract the relentless flow of disinformation that contributes to vaccine hesitancy.

The world needs local vaccine production

The pandemic has made us acutely aware of the need to expand local and regional production of vaccines and other essential healthcare products in low- and middle-income countries.

This enables both direct access to vaccines and the development of local structures for vaccine production.

This will ensure a more reliable and equitable supply in future crises, as long as the global supply chains are not disrupted.

The World Health Organization (WHO), the African Union, the European Union, the governments of South Africa, Rwanda, Senegal, Germany and France and their partners are committed to supporting industry and their partners in expanding local vaccine production and collaborating at global and at regional level to prevent and combat future pandemics.

It serves our common health security if we invest together so that all regions of the world have a modern production infrastructure, well-trained staff and suitable institutional and regulatory conditions.

WHO supports multilateral efforts to develop and disseminate mRNA technology in developing countries.

mRNA technology is a key

A year ago, the WHO, South Africa and the Drugs Patent Pool established a technology transfer center for mRNA vaccines in Cape Town with the support of the EU, France, Germany and other local and international partners.

The center aims to help spread this technology in developing countries by training and licensing manufacturers to enable them to produce their own vaccines for each country and region.