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Fez – Morocco will soon join Sinopharm’s club of vaccine manufacturers as Morocco-produced COVID vaccines will be available on the market “very soon,” Moroccan pharmaceutical laboratory Sothema has announced in its financial report for the third quarter of 2021.
“Sothema has been chosen for the manufacturing of Sinopharm‘s anti-covid-19 vaccine,” says the report, without mentioning an exact date of the start of production. It notes, however, that the launch of Moroccan-manufactured vaccine on the market will take place “very soon to meet the urgent need of the Kingdom’s self-sufficiency and then supply the whole African continent.”
With the imminent launch of the manufacturing of the anti-COVID-19 vaccine, Morocco aims at a production capacity of five million doses of COVID-19 vaccines per month.
King Mohammed VI chaired in July the launch ceremony of an ambitious COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing plan, and Morocco has already mobilized for the project a global investment budget estimated at around $500 million.
In its report, Sothema announced a turnover of MAD 530 million ($57.42 million) in the third quarter of 2021, an increase of 19.2% compared to the company’s revenues in the same period last year.
Additionally, the Moroccan laboratory says its turnover has recorded a growth of 17% to MAD 1.5 billion ($162 million) in the past nine months.
Read also: Gabon, First Country to Receive Morocco-Made COVID Vaccines
Sothema also announces a strong EBITDA growth of 18.9%, to MAD 368 million (39.8 million), over the first nine months of the year, thanks to the optimization of expenses and an increase in sales.
Meanwhile, the company’s investments by the third quarter of 2021 amounted to MAD 14.9 million ($1.6 million), up 6.4% compared to the same period last year.
“The group intends to accelerate its investments in biotechs in order to be in phase with the strategy of manufacturing biosimilars,” Sothema’s report.
The news comes as Morocco continues to elicit global plaudits for devising an effective strategy to curb the COVID crisis and nearing its vaccination goals.
Morocco has to date vaccinated 22,746,994 people, making it the first African country by far on the vaccination front and one of the best countries worldwide in terms of effectiveness in containing the spread of COVID.
But the story has been different for most other African countries. While the continent has so far been able to dodge the COVID catastrophe that many observers predicted for it in the first heady days of the pandemic, the continent still lags embarrassingly behind in terms of vaccination numbers.
According to Moroccan authorities, a significant part of Morocco’s vaccine manufacturing ambitions has to do with the country’s commitment to contributing to the vaccination campaigns of many African countries that have been unable to secure even the bare minimum of doses for their populations.
Sothema briefly echoed this sentiment in its report. In addition to achieving vaccine self-sufficiency in Morocco, it suggested, the imminent start of vaccine manufacturing is also aimed at exporting crucial doses to under-vaccinated African countries.
