Covid-19 vaccine should only be a start
Vaccination will give you a fighting chance against Covid-19. PHOTO | COURTESY
What you need to know:
- The issue: Covid-19 vaccines
- Our view: African governments must deliberately support and invest in medicine research the same way presidents have openly advocated for permanent seats on the UN Security Council.
Six African countries have been chosen to establish their own mRNA vaccine production, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said last week, with the continent largely shut out of access to Covid-19 jabs.
Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia were selected as the first recipients of technology from the WHO’s global mRNA vaccine hub, in a push to ensure Africa can make its own jabs to fight the Covid-19 and other diseases.
Yes, Covid-19 has made us rethink our healthcare systems as western countries were accused of hoarding vaccines.
In the West, as vaccine rates touch 70 percent plus, Africa is still far behind in terms of access.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is convinced that Covid-19 pandemic has shown that reliance on a few companies to supply global public goods is limiting, and dangerous.
Currently, only one percent of the vaccines used in Africa are produced on the continent of some 1.3 billion people. This is testament enough to show that more needs to be done across the board.
African children are still at risk of contracting the expanding list of killer diseases namely polio, measles, tuberculosis, diphtheria and tetanus, among others.
The vaccines we use to fight these diseases are still not produced in Africa as we still rely on the west to make donations to keep our population healthy.
Last June, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, WHO and the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) released a report showing 23 million children missed out last year on vaccines against killer diseases.
Most of these were down to the big pharmaceutical companies in the West diverting resources to medical research that focused on Covid-19. Africa was close to being left to God’s mercy for the rest of the ailments.
African governments must deliberately support and invest in medicine research the same way presidents have openly advocated for permanent seats on the UN Security Council.
Focus must be on working on products for diseases that disproportionately affected Africa. Here, the major challenges in the development of new products are the scarcity of research into new products needed to deal with the diseases in Africa; and the long time it takes to complete the processes for approval of clinical trials.
The processes involved in the approval are often so long that by the time an efficacious medicine or vaccine was developed for a disease, a lot of time had been spent in the process.The focus should be how to advocate for more resources to do more work in finding new tools.
