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Less than 5 per cent of Africans are fully vaccinated, even though surplus doses are still arriving in rich countries with high vaccination rates.© Luke Dray/Getty Images

U.S. vaccine maker Moderna has announced plans to build an African factory that would manufacture up to half-a-billion doses annually, after facing sharp criticism for selling its COVID-19 vaccines primarily to wealthy countries.

Moderna says it will invest up to US$500-million in the factory, but it has not yet selected a site or even a country in Africa. The construction and approval of the facility is expected to take two to four years, leaving it unable to help in the current massive global shortage of vaccines.

The company said it expects to “begin a process for country and site selection soon.” The factory would be capable of producing other vaccines in addition to the COVID-19 vaccine, it said.

Vaccines are desperately needed across Africa, the region with the lowest COVID-19 immunization rate in the world. Less than 5 per cent of Africans are fully vaccinated, even though surplus doses are still arriving in rich countries with high vaccination rates.

There has been a “horrifying inequity” in the distribution of vaccines, according to World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

While high-income and upper-middle-income countries have used 75 per cent of all vaccines so far, low-income countries have received less than half of 1 per cent of the world’s doses, he told a media briefing on Thursday.

“We stand on the precipice of failure if we don’t make the benefits of science available to all people in all countries right now,” he said.

In a statement on Thursday, Moderna chief executive officer Stéphane Bancel said, “We are determined to extend Moderna’s societal impact through the investment in a state-of-the-art mRNA manufacturing facility in Africa.”

Critics say Moderna should do more to share its vaccine technology with poorer countries because its costs were heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. By some estimates, it has received more than US$8-billion in public funding from the U.S. government, including research and development funding and supply contracts.

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In January, 2020, Moderna accepted a research grant from a non-profit organization with the promise that it would follow “equitable access principles” – making its vaccine available at an affordable price in low-income countries. But so far it has sold an estimated 85 per cent of its vaccines to rich countries, including Canada, the United States and many in Europe.

In May, the company promised to supply up to 500 million doses of its vaccine to the non-profit COVAX program, the main source of supply for low-income countries. But only a small fraction – 34 million doses – are scheduled to be delivered to COVAX by the end of this year, while the bulk will be delivered next year.

And even those promises are not guaranteed. “Alarmingly, most manufacturers supplying COVAX have repeatedly downgraded the timelines for delivering their projected volumes to the COVAX facility,” the WHO said in a vaccine-strategy document released on Thursday.

John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said the Moderna announcement is welcome news, but will be useful only in the medium and long term. “It doesn’t necessarily solve our problems today,” he told a media briefing on Thursday.

“The problems we have to solve today are quick access to vaccines, redistribution of vaccines, making sure that certain licences are provided so that manufacturing can start regionally.”

Public Citizen, a U.S.-based consumer-advocacy group, said Moderna’s promise to build a factory in Africa does not excuse its failure to share its technology or adequate doses of its vaccine today.

“Moderna holds secret a vaccine recipe that humanity needs, a vaccine pioneered significantly by public science and developed in large part by billions in public money,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s access-to-medicines program.

Early indications are that Moderna will seek to maintain its monopoly power over its African factory and its vaccine technology, he said in a statement.

The WHO is trying to develop a vaccine technology hub in South Africa as a base for African production. The hub is aiming to replicate Moderna’s vaccine, but the plan has been stalled because so far the WHO has been unable to reach any agreement with the U.S. company on technology sharing.

While low-income countries continue to suffer from the severe shortage of vaccines, an estimated 870 million surplus doses are expected to pile up in wealthy countries by the end of this year, including 62 million doses in Canada, according to a report on Thursday by Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).

The hoarding of vaccines by rich countries is putting millions of people at risk of dying, the report said. It called for Canada and other countries to take urgent steps to redistribute their vaccines – a step that could avert the deaths of nearly a million people by mid-2022 alone.

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