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Covid-19: WHO efforts to bring vaccine manufacturing to Africa are undermined by the drug industry
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The BMJ (Formerly British Medical Journal)
Posted: March 6th, 2022
https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o304
A foundation representing the vaccine maker BioNTech has been accused of seeking to undermine the World Health Organization’s initiative to bring covid vaccine manufacturing to the African continent. The kENUP Foundation, a consultancy hired by BioNTech, has claimed that WHO’s hub, which is creating a covid-19 mRNA vaccine that African companies can make, is unlikely to be successful and will infringe on patents, documents obtained by The BMJ have shown. Instead, they show kENUP promoting BioNTech’s proposal to ship mRNA factories housed in sea containers from Europe to Africa, initially staffed with BioNTech workers, and a proposed new regulatory pathway to approve the vaccines made in these factories. The novel pathway has been described as paternalistic and unworkable. The move threatens the pan-African venture backed by WHO that seeks to scale up African production of lifesaving vaccines from 1% to 60% by 2040. WHO’s technology transfer hub, launched in June 2021 and based in South Africa, uses publicly available information to recreate Moderna’s vaccine, to teach companies and scientists across the continent how to use mRNA technology. It will then develop a comparable vaccine, which, if successful in clinical trials and approved by regulators, it will manufacture industrially. In a document sent to South African government officials after a visit to the country on 11-14 August last year, the kENUP Foundation said that the hub’s activity should be stopped.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on coronavirus vaccines and Big Pharma profiteering from reliable major media sources
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