South Africa already had two sites for the assembly and packaging of anti-Covid vaccines. The Aspen group already packages Johnson & Johnson vaccines there. And within a few weeks, the Biovac institute in Cape Town should start assembling the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The newcomer has even more ambition. This time, it is a question of manufacturing the vaccine against Covid on site from A to Z. The factory inaugurated on Wednesday January 19 in Cape Town was financed by the biotechnology billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong. The American businessman was born in South Africa to Chinese parents. He did part of his studies at the prestigious University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, from which he graduated in medicine. A biologist, he made his fortune by developing Abraxane, an anti-cancer drug.
Doctor Soon-Shiong has raised more than 57 million euros for the launch of the project. About 172 million more will be needed to complete it, he said at the inauguration. The objective is to achieve a production of one billion doses of vaccines by 2025. Thanks to the transfer of messenger RNA technology, mastered by his company Nantworks, Patrick Soon-Shiong intends to develop in South Africa second-generation vaccines, in order to remedy the loss of efficacy over time and the appearance of variants.
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has opened a vaccine manufacturing plant in Cape Town.
The initiative of South African-born billionaire Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong aims to be the first in Africa to produce Covid-19 vaccines from start to finish.https://t.co/8d1WC7xJ2F pic.twitter.com/jxSSfYqOnF
— BBC News Africa (@BBCAfrica) January 19, 2022
(Translation : “Cyril Ramaphosa, the President of South Africa, has inaugurated a vaccine manufacturing plant in Cape Town. Billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong’s goal is to produce vaccines against Covid-19 from A to Z .”)
South African research institutes and four local universities will be involved in the work. The hope is also to develop other vaccines for other diseases with this messenger RNA technique.
The inauguration of the Cape Town plant also has a more political significance which is close to the heart of both Patrick Soon-Shiong and Cyril Ramaphosa, the South African President who co-chaired the inauguration. The objective is to produce “a second generation vaccine and we want to manufacture it in Africa, for Africa, and export it all over the world”, said the businessman.
For Cyril Ramaphosa, it’s sort of a revenge. “Africa must no longer be the last to access vaccines in the event of a pandemic. Africa must no longer beg and plead with Western countries for vaccines.” And to continue: “We will manage on our own, (…) freed from the chains of colonialism.” Remember that barely 10% of the population of the African continent is fully vaccinated against 70% in Europe.