Pretoria - There is a need for Africa to produce its own vaccines to avoid a repeat of the Covid-19 situation, whereby its population was almost left in the lurch in terms of accessing inoculation.
This was the sentiment expressed by some speakers at the two-day 8th biennial conference, which ended yesterday at the CSIR.
Speakers said they believed that the vast inequality in production, distribution and administration of vaccines during the pandemic must be a wake-up call for Africa to build its capabilities in terms of producing vaccines and other biologic products.
The conference was hosted under the theme, “Harnessing research, development and innovation for a robust South African economy”.
At least 1 800 people, who included scientific experts, academia, industry leaders from across the world and members of the public took part in the conference.
Stavros Nicolaou, group senior executive at Aspen Pharmacare Holdings, said the biggest lesson that could be drawn from the pandemic was that there was a need for building local capacity to solve local problems.
He said in times of crisis, South Africa “cannot rely on solidarity”.
“Everyone looks after their own interests. Africa needs to build its capabilities if we are to survive,” he said.
He said that Africa was already in the next pandemic, called non-communicable diseases.
Nicolaou said: “What we need to achieve in our lifetime on this continent is health sovereignty and biotechnological independence, where we have our own capabilities and we don’t depend on the rest of the world. And we have to address the infectious and the non-infectious diseases.”
He talked about bridging the gap of health inequality and the relevance of health security to ordinary citizens, saying health care cuts across the economy and every walk of life.
“If we ever doubted the relevance of health care to the economy and the impact it can have on economies – we saw devastation and meltdown that occurred particularly on the African continent during Covid,” he said.
He advocated for a global procurement reform, also mentioning a proposed policy change by the AU, which stated in a May 17 communique that a minimum of 30% of Africa vaccine requirements must come from African producers.
Nicolaou said what Africa needed to achieve was health sovereignty and biotechnology independence.
There was a question posed whether climate change contributed to the outbreak of viruses.
Nicolaou said: “There is empirical evidence that climate change influences the type of virus and bacteria that we are seeing manifesting.”
Speaking about opportunities for entrepreneurs in science and innovation, Dr Thulani Dlamini said … that in other parts of the world, small, medium enterprises create jobs. We need to make sure that the policy environment is conducive for the small medium micro enterprises.”
Dlamini said: “Localisation is something that is for us very imperative, especially in certain sectors of the economy.”
He said during Covid-19 the country did not have the ability to produce masks, sanitisers and vaccines.
Pretoria News