Africa’s drive to set up a vaccine industry after being left at the back of the queue in the global scramble for Covid-19 shots has stumbled at the first hurdle. | Fin24
As the omicron variant was spreading through South Africa late last year, the continent’s biggest pharmaceutical company was negotiating a deal to make a Covid-19 vaccine under license from Johnson & Johnson.
"There were a lot of calls both from the West and from Africa that the best way to try and solve the problem was to establish our own local vaccine production capacity," said Stavros Nicolaou, Aspen’s head of strategic trade. What happened next"sends an incredibly bad message," he said. The company went on to sign an agreement with J&J in September 2020 to make the U.S. firm’s candidate under contract, and produced about 180 million vaccines under that arrangement. Aspen started training about 500 people to work on the Covid vaccine line, and production at Aspen’s site in the South African city of Gqeberha started in early 2021.
The ultimate prize was for Aspen to make its shot under license rather than contract, allowing it to decide on recipients of the doses it produced. J&J, in a response to questions, said it’s “committed to supporting Africa’s response to Covid-19” and “a significant proportion” of the doses made under contract by Aspen had supplied the continent.
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