The European Union-Africa Summit last week brought conflicting news about mRNA vaccine production in Africa.
Two days after BioNTech executives announced plans to export a version of the Marburg plant to locations in Senegal and Rwanda via “BioNTainers”, the leaders of the WHO-backed South African mRNA technology hub announced the top six selected to receive the technology to generate mRNA vaccines at their own nodes in the country.
No developments will help speed up the coronavirus vaccination this year.
Meryame Kitir, Belgium’s Minister for Development Cooperation and Urban Policy, told a WHO press conference that she expects the Hub vaccine to be approved in 2024.
BioNTech expects its solution to be available in two to three years, COO Sierk Poetting told a news conference following BioNTainer’s announcement.
According to the leaders of the African mRNA vaccine node, the two events are not related.
The apparent discrepancy between the announcements is simply the last in the history of the West’s relentless quest to vaccinate the African continent.
COVAX
By June 2021, more than a year after the pandemic and around the same time that the COVID-19 vaccine had become widely available throughout the West, it was clear that something was not working.
While Europe and the United States had already vaccinated their citizens six months ago, some African countries had just received their first missions.
There were plans to avoid this problem, which many world health experts had predicted from the beginning. COVAX, the UN-backed global vaccine alliance, had to deliver vaccines to Africa. But these plans got confused when rich countries bought most of the vaccines for themselves, leaving little for low-income countries.
The COVAX alliance had good intentions, but it did not work. And with patent talks seemingly deadlocked, making it almost impossible to develop existing vaccines in Africa, African leaders have decided to try something new. They would create their own.
The Hub opens
With the help of the WHO, at the end of June 2021, the world’s first mRNA technology transfer hub opened in South Africa with partners Biovac, Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, a network of universities and the Africa CDC.
Their plan was simple: They would create an mRNA vaccine and then work with other “nodes” in low-income countries around the world to share the technology, enabling cheap worldwide production of mRNA vaccines. The plan would free low-income countries from dependence on their respective high-income countries for vaccine shipments.
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The Hub decided to use unauthorized data from the Moderna vaccine, which the company had during the pandemic. “From the beginning, they had asked for help from the biggest pharmaceutical companies,” said Afrigen director Petro Terblanche. But the companies did not respond.
Instead of responding to the hub’s requests for cooperation, BioNTech-Pfizer announced its own separate plans a month later to facilitate access to vaccines on the African continent.
In collaboration with Biovac, a South African biopharmaceutical company, BioNTech will manufacture the vaccines and then ship them to South Africa, where they will be bottled and shipped across the continent. Production will begin around the second half of 2022, they said.
Four days later, they announced more plans to help vaccinate Africans – this time not against COVID, but against malaria.
Together with the Kenup Foundation, a Malta-based lobby company that has partnered with BioNTech in recent years on the EU-funded malaria eradication campaign, they will develop the first mRNA vaccine against malaria. Vaccine production facilities will be co-located with WHO technology transfer hubs, they said.
“Stop copying Moderna immediately”
About two weeks later, Kenup’s executive Holm Keller embarked on a voyage to South Africa. He visited the technology transfer hub and met with many South African health leaders. The trip had nothing to do with malaria – it focused on the transport hub.
Perhaps the leaders Keller met with thought this meant that BioNTech was ready to work with the Hub to develop its own mRNA vaccine.
But a report summarizing the mission said otherwise.
“The WHO’s vaccine technology transfer hub project to copy Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine production process should be terminated immediately,” the report, entitled Supporting Vaccine Production Hub in South Africa, said. “This is done to prevent damage to Afrigen, BioVac and Moderna.”
The report was first published in a study published in early February by the British Medical Journal.
Two weeks after the mission, on August 27, Kenup’s officials convened a meeting during the G20 summit on behalf of BioNTech. Rwanda President Paul Kagame, Senegal President Macky Sall, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and BioNTech CEO Uğur Şahin met in Berlin to discuss the development of production sites for the production of mRNA vaccines against malaria. tuberculosis and COVID-19.
In a joint statement, Kenup wrote that potential sites of the necessary production sites “are expected to co-locate with the forthcoming WHO vaccine hubs.”
The report added that “in principle, the BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine could possibly be manufactured at local distribution facilities in Africa.”
BioNTainer solution
At the African Union-European Union summit about six months later and two weeks after Hub officials said they had successfully copied a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, BioNTech made its big announcement.
The company will manufacture BioNTainers – exact replicas of the BioNTech plant in Marburg, Germany – in Rwanda and Senegal.
Asked at a news conference why the company was not working with the Hub, as he said in a joint statement on August 27 and in the July announcement of Malaria, Poetting replied: ».
That’s not true, Afrigen’s director Petro Terblanche told DW. Terblanche led the Hub to copy the Moderna vaccine and met with Keller in August.
“They do not bind to the mRNA node,” Terblanche said. “I do not know of any other node in Africa. They are also not working with the mRNA node at the moment. I still hope they do.”
WHO officials, when asked by DW why BioNTech was not co-located with the South African node and why Poetting said the company was co-located with the node when node officials said it was not, said: “Ask BioNTech. “
Neither BioNTech nor the Kenup Foundation responded to multiple requests for comment from DW.
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The fastest choice?
Poetting told a news conference that the rationale behind the BioNTainer solution was speed. It would be faster than other options, he said.
But Achal Prabhala, coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, which aims to expand access to medicines and vaccines for those in need, and Alain Alsalhani, of Médecins Sans Frontières, say that is not true.
The two wrote a report in December outlining eight existing vaccine manufacturers in Africa where pharmaceutical companies such as BioNTech or Moderna could be equipped to produce mRNA vaccines.
The BioNtainers will need more time to start up compared to upgrading existing facilities, Prabhala said. While the BioNTainer solution will take about two to three years, the post-upgrade will only take three to six months, he said.
“In my opinion, BioNTech’s announcement is a more explosive way for a large multinational to make a fairly simple announcement: That it will set up some regional outposts,” Prabhala told DW.
Alsalhani told DW that if fully validated by regulators, the BioNTainer idea could be a very quick way to build new mRNA production capacity, “but we’re not there yet.”
He believes that the most important advantage of the BioNTtainer idea as opposed to the idea of upgrading is the complete control of the facilities. BioNTech can determine the price and location of products sold.
“It confuses my mind”
Terblanche said it was shocked by BioNTech’s indifference to cooperation.
“I do not understand why they did not deal with the Hub,” he told DW.
He said it did not make sense for the company not to “seize the opportunity” to share its technology with the outposts, which the Hub announced on Friday would be available so far in Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal. South Africa and Tunisia.
“What they are proposing and planning now will cost them much more,” he said. “To be honest, I try to understand this strategy and it confuses my mind.”
Terblanche, like Alsalhani, recognized that the BioNTainer solution is very innovative.
But he said it is the opposite approach from the transport center. The hub focuses on technology sharing. BioNTainers will be fully controlled by the company.
Edited by: Carla Bleiker
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