BRICS bloc countries have given South Africa the nod for a state-of-the-art vaccine centre to be established in the country, says an IoL report. President Cyril Ramphosa has announced that leaders from Brazil, China, India and Russia had all agreed that the centre is based in South Africa. Ramaphosa said the country was extremely pleased with this decision by the international community.
The report says the vaccine centre, which will be based in Johannesburg, is set to give BRICS-affiliated countries and those on the African continent a platform for thorough research to be conducted in order to tackle the burden of diseases that continue to plague developing countries.
According to Rampahosa’s spokesperson Khusela Diko, the BRICS leaders began discussing the creation of this vaccine centre following the Ebola outbreak in Western Africa in 2014. Diko said: “While we have cooperation at an economic, political and security and people-to-people level, at the end of the day we have health at the core of these issues and they needed to find a way where BRICS is adequately capacitated to respond to such challenges.”
She added: “Work has already started in terms of setting it up and we are looking at a wide variety of issues. There are only things unique to our regions and we’ll be looking at developing vaccines around those so it is a work in progress.”
The report says it is yet unclear how much has been set aside for the vaccine centre and whether the BRICS development bank will fund this project.
[link url="https://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/bricssummit-sa-given-green-light-to-establish-vaccine-centre-16283535"]IoL report[/link]