JOHANNESBURG, Aug 11 (Reuters) – Africa’s top public health
body said on Thursday it was hopeful South African
pharmaceutical firm Aspen Pharmacare would get orders
for its own brand COVID-19 vaccine.
Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said
last month that it is in detailed discussions with buyers to
generate demand for Aspen’s COVID-19 vaccine Aspenovax.
Just one fifth of adults in Africa are fully vaccinated
against COVID-19, but demand has fallen across the continent
which already receives donated vaccines from Western countries
and has supplies to hand from earlier purchases.
“We are quite confident that we will be able to get some
positive results out of the negotiations that are continuing,”
Ahmed Ogwell Ouma, Acting Director of Africa CDC, told reporters
on Thursday.
Aspen currently produces vaccines for Johnson & Johnson
but it struck a deal in March to produce, price, and
sell its own-brand version of the shot for African markets.
However, it has not received any orders for the vaccine to
date and the company told Reuters on Wednesday that its vaccine
production lines, with a 450-million-dose annual production
capacity, could soon be idled, or converted to produce
anesthetics and other sterile products.
“We as Africa CDC, the African Union, we do not want to see
a situation where Aspen closes any of their manufacturing
capacity to (produce) COVID-19 vaccines,” Ouma said, declining
to give a timeline on possible orders for Aspen.
Ouma said Africa CDC wants every manufacturing facility on
the continent that is manufacturing any health product,
particularly vaccines, to have buyers from and for the
continent.
“Any closure (of manufacturing capacity) will not be good
for the continent, will not be good for health security
globally,” he said.
(Reporting by Promit Mukherjee in Johannesburg and Bhargav
Acharya in Bengaluru, editing by Mark Heinrich, Kirsten Donovan)
