India’s plight battling the ferocious second wave of Pandemic has rightly got Africa worried. What’s happening in India must not happen here,” Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Africa, said at a virtual press briefing last week.
There are valid reasons for this worry. The continent’s weak health care infrastructure makes Africa very vulnerable.
Though overall, cases and deaths have been dropping in Africa after peaking in January; countries across the continent continue to report sustained transmission. Moreover, more virulent variants of the virus have also surfaced in some parts of Africa. Some cases of the Indian Variant have been confirmed in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa.
To add to the misery, Africa’s immunisation drive also could not gain momentum. African immunization campaigns are heavily dependent on the COVAX, the global vaccine-sharing alliance, whose main supplier is the Serum Institute of India. Serum institute, due to India’s second wave crisis suspended its exports of the COVID vaccine in March which pushed Africa’s vaccine rollouts into utter chaos. Africa CDC data shows that only 2% of the continent’s population has received the first or second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine so far — that’s only about 1% of doses administered worldwide, according to the WHO.
The COVID 19 scenario in the continent until recently has not been alarming. According to data collected by Johns Hopkins University and the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, so far Africa has reported just fewer than 3% of the world’s cases and less than 4% of the fatalities.
India’s COVID story also until late February was not worrisome. India was considered a success story, with its own Vaccine manufacturing facility and favourable factors like a warm climate, young population, and high population density that helped in fighting the Pandemic. But the situation changed suddenly with the mutation of the virus and India became an epicenter of the Pandemic. Similarly, the narrative can change abruptly with more contagious variants fuelling a health crisis in Africa. Africa with its frail infrastructure may not be able to withstand such a spike.
South Africa went through an India-like second wave of COVID-19 infections earlier this year accounting for almost 35% of the continent’s infections and nearly 44% of the fatalities, according to Africa CDC data. Despite having a superior health infrastructure, South Africa recorded more than 1.5 million confirmed cases and over 54,000 deaths. Although daily new infections in South Africa have fallen from nearly 22,000 in mid-January to around 2,000, there are apprehensions about a third and potentially more severe wave with the start of the winter season in June.
For decades, Africa has imported 99% of its vaccines. Its time for Africa to strengthen its own vaccination manufacturing base. Instead of waiting at the rear end of the queue for its quota, Africa should collectively work toward its own solutions and cater to its own needs. Some developments in this direction have been encouraging.
AU’s announcement last month, about the launch of a partnership to manufacture vaccines at five research centers across the continent within the next 15 years, is a welcome development. It is expected to enable Africa to produce 60% of all vaccines used in Africa within 20 years. The African Development Bank has also committed to finance at least two technology platforms for vaccine production, which can produce at least 300 million doses per year. An African Medicines Agency (AMA) — similar to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) — which would provide national African regulators with regulatory guidance on new medicines will also be in place soon.
Investment attractiveness of Africa has improved with African Union’s free-trade area, which began operating in January of this year. Companies that sell to different countries will pay fewer additional costs in the form of taxes and tariffs.
China and Russia are already in the process of investing in Africa to produce their COVID 19 vaccines. Egyptian Health Minister has announced that Egypt will start locally producing China’s Sinovac Covid-19 vaccine in June. Russia is planning to roll out its vaccine Sputnik in the third quarter of 2021. The Russian Direct Investment Fund, along with Egypt’s Minapharm and its Berlin-based subsidiary, issued a joint press release recently that a deal has been signed to manufacture more than 40 million doses annually in Cairo.
Scaling up the production of vaccines and ensuring their equitable access would also require building the institutional capacity, overcoming systemic bottlenecks, and undertaking the necessary reforms. Let us hope that Africa will find the right support within and globally to build its own capacity for vaccines. As India rightly cautioned the U.N. General Assembly last month, vaccine inequity will defeat the collective global resolve to contain the coronavirus.
