A home-grown Covid vaccine would need a major combined effort

SA has recently witnessed a flurry of activity and announcements about Covid-19 vaccine acquisition and production, as the country enters the fray to redress the injustice of global vaccine maldistribution.

Much criticism has been directed at the government and our world-class scientists for failing to produce and manufacture a vaccine locally. The former chair of the ministerial advisory committee, Professor Salim Abdool Karim, even gave a public apology in January for failing to propose local vaccine development to the government. "I feel I let my country down," he said.

While SA could be forgiven for not matching up to fellow Brics members China and Russia, which are producing their own vaccines, criticism has once again resurfaced in light of Cuba having developed a Covid-19 vaccine, which it says has 92% efficacy. The vaccine, Abdala, requires three shots. A second vaccine developed in Cuba is said to be 62% effective.

Nowhere in Africa can a vaccine be produced from start to finish because a complete value chain of vaccine development does not exist, and yet much of Africa still remains in desperate need with less than 2% of the population vaccinated.

The inequity of vaccine access, skewed highly in favour of the global North, has left Africa as a whole vulnerable to new waves of Covid-19. Apart from the toll in lives and on physical health, it is now common knowledge that there is also a negative effect on mental health and social relations, in addition to negative impacts on the livelihoods of citizens and a country's economy.

We have now heard from countries in the North, such as the US, about how their economies are "roaring again", all thanks to their early access to vaccines. These countries were among the first to produce their own vaccines, in efforts led by their top universities and biotechnology companies, often highly subsidised by well-endowed state coffers.

Making vaccines is not cheap, and unlikely to be achieved without wealthy investors and the assurance of return on investments from high demand for these vaccines, including guarantees from state organs as purchasers.

The British government invested heavily in the Oxford vaccine research and the US government launched Operation Warp Speed, a $10bn (about R143bn) public-private partnership to support the development, manufacture and distribution of various vaccines. These included the Oxford/AstraZeneca vector vaccine, the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vector vaccine, Moderna's mRNA vaccine and the Novavax recombinant protein vaccine.

We have now heard from countries in the North, such as the US, about how their economies are 'roaring again', all thanks to their early access to vaccines

Whilst BioNTech had previously benefited from many years of investments from the German government, the partnership with Pfizer led to a guaranteed order of 100 million doses for nearly $2bn by the US government through Operation Warp Speed. The combined political, scientific, technological and financial investments have resulted in huge returns for countries in the North.

More than 45% of the US population is fully vaccinated, and more than 93% of people 50 and older in the UK are fully vaccinated. The UK uses the Oxford/AstraZeneca and BioNTech/Pfizer vaccines, both of which have been found to be effective against symptomatic disease caused by the highly transmissible Delta variant, 60% and 88% respectively.

Though these countries in the global North are seeing some increase in infections due to the Delta variant, hospitalisations and deaths remain low, which attests to the effectiveness of vaccines in reducing severe disease and death.

The J&J single-dose vaccine, which also benefited from Operation Warp Speed and passed scrutiny by US regulators, has now also been declared to have 85% effectiveness against the Delta variant, and will therefore not need a booster shot in the near future.

It is therefore understandable for us as South Africans, and Africans in general, to wish we had our own locally produced vaccine, especially when we find ourselves in the middle of an onslaught from relentless surges and waves of infection, as we did in July last year, again in January, and now.

Our frustrations will be directed at what we see as failures in government leadership, and conspiracy theories will emerge and become dominant narratives of discontent.

But we should pause and consider what it takes to produce a successful vaccine, and ask ourselves whether SA was truly in a position to achieve this feat. Well, given that a candidate plant-based vaccine has been produced in SA, the science itself may not have been a problem.

SA is determined to build capacity to manufacture vaccines locally, an enterprise that has finally gained oxygen of late, and to do so for the benefit of the country and Africa as a whole.

However, it remains to be seen whether the political sphere and potential investors can combine efforts with scientists and the biotech industry to form a viable ecosystem with a complete value chain, and successfully manufacture vaccines for SA and Africa.

• Professor Moshabela is acting deputy vice-chancellor: research & innovation at the University of KwaZulu-Natal