The new consortium will include drugmakers Biovac and Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, a network of universities and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. They will develop training facilities for other vaccine makers to make shots that use a genetic code of the spike protein, known as mRNA vaccines.
Poor countries in Africa and elsewhere are facing dire shortages of COVID-19 jabs despite some countries having the ability to produce vaccines, lamented Lara Dovifat, a campaign and advocacy adviser for Doctors Without Borders. More than 1 billion coronavirus vaccines have been administered globally, but fewer than 1 per cent have been in poor countries.
Gauteng province, the country's most populous with the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria, is the worst-affected by the current surge with 60 per cent of the new cases. All public and private hospitals are full, yet the numbers of new confirmed cases continue to rise, the province's deputy premier, David Makhura, said Monday.
With dozens of countries desperately waiting for more doses after the COVAX initiative, a UN-backed plan to distribute vaccines to poor countries faltered in recent months, the WHO has been trying to persuade rich countries to donate vaccines once their most vulnerable populations are immunized.
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