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Moderna on Thursday announced plans to spend up to $ 500 million to build a vaccine factory in Africa, capable of producing up to 500 million doses of mRNA vaccines per year – including, but not limited to , coronavirus vaccines.
“While we are still working to increase the capacity of our current network to deliver vaccines for the ongoing pandemic in 2022, we believe it is important to invest in the future. We plan to manufacture our COVID-19 vaccine as well as additional products within our mRNA vaccine portfolio at this facility, ”said Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel.
Modern declaration said the country and site for the plant had not yet been chosen, but the site selection process would begin “soon”.
A health worker shows vials of Moderna coronavirus vaccine before administering them to colleagues who have previously been vaccinated with the Sinovac vaccine in North Sumatra, Indonesia, August 4, 2021 (AP Photo / Binsar Bakkara)
Unnamed health experts said Reuters that South Africa, Rwanda and Senegal were likely choices. South African officials were clearly unaware of Moderna’s plans until the public announcement was made.
“Moderna and its partners have increased their capacity worldwide and to date have provided more than 500 million doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine” the company said. “As recently announced, several efforts are being made to continue to increase capacity at a significant rate. This announcement is a new investment to add a manufacturing site in Africa to Moderna’s expanding global network.
The director of the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, John Nkengasong, told Reuters on Thursday that the announcement surprised him because he had not been consulted by Moderna before making his decision.
Nkengasong added that a greater vaccine capacity for Africa was welcome, but doubted the Moderna plant would be commissioned quickly enough to have a major impact on Africa’s battle against the coronavirus. He suggested that Moderna’s new plant could be of use to the Partnerships for vaccine manufacturing in Africa initiative launched by the African Union and Africa CDC in April.
A patient suspected of suffering from the COVID-19 coronavirus is tested at the isolation center at Maiduguri Teaching Hospital on May 10, 2020, in Borno State, Nigeria. (Audu Marte / AFP via Getty Images)
A vaccine regulator at the World Health Organization (WHO) also told Reuters that the vaccine plant proposed by Moderna could “help fight diseases of public health interest other than the coronavirus and which had not yet received research and development support.
Wednesday, WHO allowed its first approval of a malaria vaccine, developed by GlaxoSmithKline and which is currently proving successful in a pilot program in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi.
The Financial Time (FT) suggested that Moderna’s somewhat surprising announcement was made in response to criticism that vaccine makers are not doing enough to inoculate the development world, and perhaps to protect against proposals that ” would force them to give up intellectual property rights to encourage increased use of their technologies. “
FT noted Moderna’s rival and Pfizer’s partner, BioNTech, recently announced that it would establish an mRNA vaccine manufacturing plant in Africa, possibly Senegal or Rwanda. Moderna, however, would become “the first company to announce plans for a wholly-owned mRNA facility in the region that would produce the active ingredient in the vaccine.”
Bloomberg News quoted Bancel as saying that the proposed African facility would be comparable to the main factory in Moderna, Massachusetts, “owned and operated by Moderna but made up mostly of local workers.”
Rwanda Biomedical Center (RBC) staff screen passengers at a bus station after the government suspended all unnecessary movement for two weeks to curb the spread of the coronavirus in Kigali, Rwanda, March 22, 2020 (Simon Wohlfahrt / AFP via Getty Images)
“We played out a lot of scenarios over the past two months and decided we had to do something big in Africa. The only way to do it right, if you’re looking at a 5-10 year period, was to build our own factory like we did in America, so that’s exactly the model, ”he said. .
Bancel said in this interview that five African countries were under review, but did not name them.
The Washington post observed that Moderna’s announcement came after “tensions between the Biden administration and Moderna erupted over the past week,” including a “contentious” meeting on Friday where the administration reportedly demanded a billion vaccine doses for developing countries by the end of next year.
“For months, the US government begged Moderna to increase domestic and international production so that it could increase donations to low- and middle-income countries,” the Washington post noted. “But in two meetings over the past week, officials in the Biden administration became enraged by the biotech company’s refusal to commit to doing so.”
President Joe Biden, accompanied by Vice President Kamala Harris, delivers remarks on COVID-19 National Action Month on Wednesday, June 2, 2021, in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office building at the White House . (Official White House photo by Adam Schultz)
According to from the Washington Post sources, the Biden administration is “frustrated” and “infuriated” by Moderna because the company has received billions of dollars in government funding to develop its vaccine, as well as help from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases , but Moderna has been slow to respond to government requests.
The administration is also obviously irritated with how much money Moderna executives have made from the coronavirus vaccines, as the Washington post made a point of mentioning that three of them have just become billionaires and have joined the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans.
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