Wilmot James: Africa should boost vaccine-making capacity to deal with future disease outbreaks
Wilmot James, ISERP Senior Research Scholar, published an article in Business Day with Lewis Rubin-Thompson.
Local governments will be better able to support mass vaccination efforts in future without having to rely on foreign suppliers.
The Covid-19 pandemic has often been described as a “once-in-a-century” occurrence, but the reality in the light of the cumulative record is that the likelihood of another pandemic occurring in our lifetime is high. Driven by factors such as climate change, deforestation and the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the risk of novel disease outbreaks has been steadily increasing in recent years.
mRNA vaccines, such as those developed for Covid-19 by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, have the potential to be quickly adapted to fight new diseases and thus hold the key to preventing future pandemics.
In a recent symposium at Columbia University that focused on Covid-19 vaccine development, strategy and implementation, Moncef Slaoui, the former director of the US’s Operation Warp Speed, described mRNA vaccines as a useful platform technology that can be quickly adapted and authorised by the US Food and Drug Administration in response to new variants of Sars-CoV-2.