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Rabat – German biotech giant BioNTech is revising its plans for a vaccine factory network in Africa, according to business news outlet Bloomberg.
According to a report published on Saturday, the company is reconsidering its plans for factories in Rwanda, South Africa, and Senegal, over a year after they broke ground on their Rwanda facility.
Although the company recently shipped six containers to Kigali for construction purposes, they are reportedly considering scrapping the South Africa facility and downgrading the Senegal site to a smaller-scale factory or possibly an R&D center.
The revised plans bring Africa’s vaccine self-sufficiency hopes into question, especially after countries in the continent struggled to perform effective vaccination campaigns during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The planned factory network in Africa was part of the German company’s efforts to ensure equal global access to mRNA vaccines, which were infamously hoarded by richer countries during the recovery from the pandemic.
The German manufacturer told Bloomberg that its goal of “helping to democratize access to innovative medicines remains unchanged,” confirming that it is still working on establishing a commercial-scale facility in Rwanda.
The country recently saw a shipment of several “BioNTrainer” modules, which the company uses to manufacture vaccines with the mRNA technology, which rose in prominence as part of the COVID-19 vaccine development efforts.
In their efforts to recover from the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic over the past few years, African countries complained of the lack of availability of vaccines, as the limited quantities kept getting hoarded by richer countries.
Experts called for a more equitable distribution as leaving certain areas unvaccinated could result in virus mutations and new spreads that could make a true global recovery harder to accomplish.
