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Moderna set to invest $500m in a vaccine factory in Africa
The pharmaceutical giant said the facility would produce 500m doses a year, but is yet to announce where the factory will be based
Moderna has unveiled plans to invest roughly $500 million to build a facility in Africa to produce half a billion doses of mRNA vaccines each year, including its coronavirus shot.
The pharmaceutical company - which is under growing pressure to manufacture it's Covid-19 vaccine on the continent - did not offer details about where a proposed factory would be based, but said it would “begin a process for country and site selection soon”.
Alongside manufacturing the vaccine doses themselves, the factory may include “fill and finish” and packaging capabilities, the company added.
“We are determined to extend Moderna’s societal impact through the investment in a state-of-the-art mRNA manufacturing facility in Africa,” Stephane Bancel, chief executive of Moderna, said in a statement on Thursday.
“We expect to manufacture our Covid-19 vaccine as well as additional products within our mRNA vaccine portfolio at this facility,” he said.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Mr Bancel added that the company aims to build a facility comparable to its main factory in Massachusetts, and suggested there is a short list of around five African countries with the political stability, infrastructure and educated workforce suitable for a high-tech messenger RNA factory.
Such a factory would be the first in Africa. In July, BioNTech announced a deal with South Africa’s Biovac to help produce roughly 100 million doses of their Covid-19 vaccine at a facility in Cape Town - though the agreement centred around the “fill and finish” process, not the initial production of vaccine.
Moderna’s announcement comes amid mounting pressure for pharmaceutical companies to manufacture their jabs in Africa, which has the lowest vaccination rates in the world after wealthy countries bought up most of the available supply. Just 4.6 per cent of the continent’s 1.2 billion people have had two Covid shots - in the UK that figure stands at 66 per cent.
“Vaccine manufacturing is very, very much welcome news,” Dr John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, told a press conference on Thursday. “It is news or efforts that will address our medium term to long term needs.
But he added: “It doesn’t necessarily solve our problem today. The problems we have to solve today is access - quick access to vaccines.”
There have been growing calls for wealthy countries to share more available vaccines with lower income countries through the Covax scheme, and G20 nations have made grand promises to donate more shots to help “vaccinate the world”.
But so far calls to waive patents on vaccines - an idea backed by the United States as well as most lower income nations - have been resisted by pharmaceutical giants, plus governments including the UK and Germany.
Manufacturers have argued that sharing intellectual property - effectively the recipe to make the vaccines - will do little to boost supply in the short term as the production process is so complex and there are few factories capable of producing shots standing idle. They have said technology transfer would be a more effective route.
But last month, sources told Reuters that talks between Moderna and the World Health Organization - which is trying to establish an African tech transfer hub for vaccines - have stalled.
Politico also reported on Thursday that the company is resisting pressure from the White House to increase international donations of its Covid-19 shot in 2022. One senior US government official suggested to the news outlet this may be driven by financial concerns; the Biden administration would probably aim to buy Moderna vaccines to donate to poorer countries at cost.
On Wednesday, Sweden and Denmark paused the use of Moderna's vaccine for younger age groups after rare reports of heart inflammation,citing data from an unpublished Nordic study. Finland on Thursday also said that the rare reports of myocarditis meant it would stop offering the vaccine to younger males. .
“A Nordic study involving Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark found that men under the age of 30 who received Moderna Spikevax had a slightly higher risk than others of developing myocarditis,” said Mika Salminen, director of the Finnish health institute.
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