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SA lags behind in its capacity to produce vaccines: Academics

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Academics at two Cape Town universities say South Africa is lagging behind in its capacity to produce vaccines.

The academics at the universities of Stellenbosch and Cape Town say this is because of poor financial investment and a lack of political will.

The first batch of one-million COVID-19 vaccines developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University arrived in South Africa last week.

President Cyril Ramaphosa welcomes the first batch of vaccines: 

South Africa is said to be behind the curve in procurement and distribution.

University of Stellenbosch Virology Professor, Jeffrey Dorfman, says the country needs political will to invest in pandemic scale vaccine production capacity.

“If we had more manufacturing capacity whether it’s what Aspen is doing, which is the filling and finishing of vials of what’s already been made, or whether it is producing the pathogens or mixing them, which is much more complicated. And the more capacity we can have here, the better security that we have of supply in South Africa.”

They say many developing countries have been slow to secure vaccines because they don’t make them themselves:

An expert at UCT says South Africa could have benefitted from a local vaccine production facility following developments around the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca vaccine on the new variant. Research Associate at UCT’s Immunology Division, Frank Kirstein, says South African scientists were the first to detect the new variant, but the modification of the existing vaccines did not come as fast.

“I mean South Africa was one of the first countries to detect the new variant of the virus and that shows that our researchers and scientists have the capabilities to detect these changes very quickly, and if we could translate that into the modification of the existing vaccines that would give a great advantage in fighting the disease and keep it under control.”

BRICS countries like Russia, China, and India have large vaccine manufacturing laboratories.

The academics are calling for investment into production capacity at the Biovac Institute, the only partially government accountable vaccine manufacturing institution.

Biovac only manufactures child vaccines for the Southern African market.

 

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