Opinion – Marcelo Leite: Only WHO guarantees vaccines for Africa

Almost 20 months after China started vaccinating the military with a CanSino preparation, the inequity in access to immunizations for Covid remains unresolved. Africa lagged behind, no surprise – until an RNA vaccine appeared there.

On the world average, 62% of the population received at least one dose. In the United States, it is 76% and in the European Union, 75%. Brazil has more than 80%. On the African continent, on the other hand, there are a mere 17% vaccinated.

The World Health Organization (WHO) urged RNA vaccine owners, such as Pfizer, Moderna and BioNTech, to transfer technology to peripheral countries. It ended up being ignored, and the promised donations to its Covax Facility did not arrive in the expected amount.

Even the US government supported a proposal to suspend patents on the new immunizer, but it did not prosper. There was a reaction against it from several nations, including Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro vetoed Congressional initiatives in this direction.

It wouldn’t be a panacea, of course, just an incentive. Vaccines can involve more than a hundred patents, and breaking all of them would create a huge bureaucratic mess. Under threat of lawsuits, however, who would venture?

The only opening came from Moderna, which published a lot of information about their product. It also announced that it would not enforce intellectual property rights, during the pandemic, against anyone who developed a similar immunizer.

The WHO went out into the field to seize the opportunity. In Cape Town, South Africa, it set up a “hub” to recreate RNA technology based on available data, with a budget of US$ 100 million (R$ 520 million) for the undertaking.

The result came in early February, when the firm Afrigen Biologics, a member of the consortium, announced that it had obtained a compound based on information from Moderna. The plan is to test the vaccine in humans later this year.

Afrigen only has a few microliters (millionths of a litre) of the preparation, developed with the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. It hopes to produce the amount needed for clinical trials by November.

It will not be a vaccine identical to that of Moderna, although based on the RNA sequence of the Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA) company. Afrigen works on a formulation that does not require the freezing necessary to preserve Moderna and Pfizer immunizers.

In Africa there is no deep-freezer infrastructure to handle this logistics. If and when Afrigen’s vaccine is approved for use in humans, perhaps in 2023, it would bring a major breakthrough for the continent.

And it would not be progress just for Africans. The hub is in contact with vaccine manufacturers in Argentina and Brazil, such as Fiocruz, to transfer the technology that it is already transferring to South African Biovac.

There is expectation that the new RNA vaccine will come out at lower prices for these countries. The government has already paid around R$50-60 per dose of Pfizer, a cost similar to those of Butantan.

Vaccines are the most effective means of containing the pandemic, as evidenced by the relatively low number of deaths in the explosion of cases with the omicron variant. Having autonomy in your production means not being at the mercy of oligopolies like Pfizer and Moderna, about which the European Union has already complained.

Afrigen’s achievement demonstrates the error of those who condemned the efforts of Butantan and Fiocruz to produce immunizations here. In Brazil, there are another two dozen projects to create vaccines; I hope they can repeat the African feat.