On a high-level visit to Cape Town this past weekend (11/12 February) with a delegation comprising European diplomats and South African ministers, the World Health Organisation’s Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus said SA was well on its way to becoming a leader in the vaccination industry. He expressed his satisfaction with the progress being made at Cape Town's vaccine manufacturing facilities when he toured the BioVac site in Pinelands which opened in 2003 and joined the fight against the coronavirus in 2020. Along with Afrigen Biologics, the company hopes to start distributing COVID vaccines by 2024.
He said he firmly believes major international pharmaceutical companies should be forced to surrender the patent rights over their COVID vaccines and treatments to other manufacturers.
Afrigen Biologics has used publicly available data about Moderna’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine to make its own version, and the Biovac Institute will manufacture the vaccine at commercial scale if it passes human trials expected to start before the end of the year, reports Daily Maverick.
The two companies play the key roles in a consortium with universities and other partners, including the Africa Centres for Disease Control, to develop and manufacture the first COVID mRNA vaccine in the developing world. This pilot project intends making vaccines more accessible to poor and middle-income countries and overcome “vaccine apartheid”, or the inequitable distribution of vaccines, mainly due to hoarding by rich countries.
The WHO had hoped that Pfizer, Moderna and BioNTech, which have developed and produced universally used mRNA COVID vaccines, would join the project, but they declined. So instead Afrigen developed its vaccine itself, using data about Moderna’s vaccine that had been published by the company.
The Afrigen mRNA technology transfer hub project is being supported financially by the European Union, Germany, Belgium, France, Norway and Canada, which have seen the project as an alternative to forcing major pharmaceutical companies to relinquish the patents on their COVID medicines free to manufacturers in countries like South Africa and India.
South Africa and India have been leading a campaign at the World Trade Organization (WTO) for a “Trips waiver” for COVID vaccines and treatments and for a limited period of time, so developing countries can close the huge gap in vaccination rates with the rich world: this would be possible only if countries agreed to a waiver of these patents, currently protected under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (Trips) agreement under the WTO in Geneva.
Biovac CEO Morena Makhoana said the company, founded with government support, was already manufacturing a six-in-one vaccine for common childhood diseases and a separate vaccine for childhood pneumonia. Under an agreement with Pfizer, Biovac was also gearing up to fill that company’s COVID vaccines into vials and label them during the third quarter of this year. The company would start manufacturing Afrigen’s new vaccine at commercial scale in 2024 if the human trials of the vaccine succeeded.
Daily Maverick said Tedros praised Afrigen for developing its vaccine, saying the WHO had chosen South Africa as the first hub in the programme because of the quality of Afrigen and Biovac and the universities involved in the hub, all forming “a good ecosystem”.
He added that despite this hub, a waiver of the patent rights of big pharma companies was still needed, because Afrigen and Biovac would not start production of the new vaccine before the end of 2024. “If you get an intellectual property waiver, it could be done in six to nine months,” he said.
He noted that although more than half of the world’s population had been vaccinated, 84% of Africans had yet to receive their first dose.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Doctors Without Borders: WTO postponement underscores need for urgent action on TRIPS Waiver
Biovac’s Cape Town to pump out millions of Pfizer vaccines for Africa
Cyril Ramaphosa: Global distribution of vaccines 'unjust and immoral'
Afrigen’s Cape Town bid to reverse engineer Moderna’s vaccine
IP and COVID-19 medicines: Why a WTO waiver may not be enough