The European Union will provide financial support for vaccine manufacturing on the African continent, with the specific goal of supplying vaccines to Africa in an effort to counter the accusations of “vaccine nationalism.”
Following the “Contract with Africa” summit hosted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel as part of the G20 presidency last Friday (August 27), the German pharmaceutical giant BioNTech SE agreed in principle to treat diseases in Africa. The two locations proposed by the control center to produce vaccines: the Rwanda Biomedical Center and the Dakar Pasteur Institute.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame, Senegalese President McKee Saar, European Commission President Ursula von der Lein, Council Chairman Charles Michel and many African leaders attended the summit.
It focuses on how to best use the US$650 billion Special Drawing Rights issued by the International Monetary Fund last week to help mitigate the economic losses caused by the COVID pandemic.
Senegalese President Macky Sall said: “This initiative is a very good step towards vaccine self-reliance, including the launch of the COVID vaccine in conjunction with the MADIBA – Institut Pasteur de Dakar project.”
He added: “Supporting the rapid implementation of such initiatives in Africa will help promote the availability of COVID vaccines and establish sustainable health security in order to achieve a stronger and fairer global economic recovery.”
The European Commission said it will provide financial support as part of its “European Team” plan to fund three vaccine centers in Africa.
The committee faced criticism from African leaders who accused Europe of practicing “vaccine nationalism” in the race to continue to vaccinate its people against the new coronavirus.
Last month, a document prepared by the EU Foreign Minister showed that as of the end of June, only 4% of the 200 million COVID-19 vaccines promised by the EU and its member states had been delivered to African countries.
Most importantly, a controversy broke out in late August about the export of bottled COVID-19 vaccines from South Africa to Europe.
The committee insisted that the South African contract was part of a broader EU plan to promote investment in vaccine centers across Africa, but the arrangement was quickly condemned by the Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
BioNTech’s two locations in Rwanda and Senegal’s priority are to produce malaria and tuberculosis vaccines, not COVID vaccines. The malaria and tuberculosis vaccines will be based on so-called messenger RNA technology, which BioNTech also uses in its COVID-19 vaccine.
At the same time, the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the African Union are eager to rapidly expand the scale of drug production across the continent. The pandemic has highlighted the gap in the scale of vaccine production between Europe and Africa.
In order to achieve this goal, they hope that the BioNTech project will be supervised by the proposed African Medicines Agency, an African Union agency that aims to promote coordination of medical supervision, and its recommendations will be based on the recommendations of the World Health Organization and the European Medicines Agency.
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]
