Africa needs strong voices pushing for locally manufactured vaccines

Prioritising local vaccine manufacturing, distribution, and roll-out remains crucial to addressing some of the challenges faced by the African continent’s health systems. Ensuring that vulnerable communities have access to life-saving health innovations will not only ensure that millions of people live longer but also yield economic benefits for developing economies.

The African health landscape faces several complex challenges that call on all of us to act with the utmost urgency. Some of the challenges stem from colonialism and persist to this day, such as malnutrition, social inequality, uncoordinated regulatory bodies, poor health infrastructure development and the decline in funding for healthcare by governments.

While all of these issues and challenges have been identified and progress made to address them as envisioned in the Framework of Actions (FAS) which seeks to strengthen healthcare systems for Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for Africa, the Covid-19 pandemic exposed the vulnerabilities that persist in many health systems on the continent.

Adding to the challenges is the climate emergency which has increased emerging infectious diseases that have spread outside their endemic locations. In the past decade and more, Africa has been ravaged by ebola, measles, yellow fever, zika virus, chikungunya virus, Rift Valley fever and coronavirus, outbreaks that added to the existing burden of diseases caused by malaria, tuberculosis (TB) and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), high-burden diseases such as malaria were responsible for an estimated 608,000 deaths globally in 2022, with 95% of cases in Africa. TB was responsible for an estimated 424,000 deaths in 2022 and an estimated 25.6 million people on the continent are living with HIV, with up to 380,000 deaths caused by Aids-related illnesses. These three diseases and other infections are responsible for the loss of economic productivity amounting to more than $800-billion annually.

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension and obesity have also reached catastrophic levels with devastating outcomes resulting in more than 41 million deaths annually, with 77% of premature deaths caused by NCDs occurring in low-middle-income countries.

The human papillomavirus (HPV) has the potential to cause cervical cancer in women and the HPV vaccine remains crucial in preventing 90% of deaths related to cervical cancer.

Vaccine manufacturing