SA set to host COVID-19 vaccine technology transfer hub

South Africa is set to host a “technology transfer hub” for COVID-19 vaccines to scale up production know-how in Africa’s worst-hit nation, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s office said.

The World Health Organization has previously set up such hubs, which provide know-how and training to local manufacturers, to boost global production of influenza vaccines.

During a visit to South Africa last month, French President Emmanuel Macron said he was pushing for faster transfer of technology to allow poorer countries to start manufacturing their own COVID-19 jabs.

Ramaphosa told the Qatar Economic Forum on Monday that “52 countries in Africa have started vaccinating, but so far only 40 million doses of vaccine have been administered in Africa — or less than two percent of Africa’s population.”

South Africa, along with India, has been pushing for a temporary waiver of vaccines’ intellectual property rights in order to speed up production.

Ramaphosa has previously condemned what he calls the “vaccine apartheid” created by rich countries hoard shots, and is critical of countries that oppose the patent waiver.

“It is selfish. It is unjust, and it is wholly unfair and we’re going to continue insisting that there should be this waiver because we want to save lives,” Ramaphosa said in reply to a question at the Qatar forum.

South Africa accounts for over 35 percent of Africa’s total recorded COVID-19 cases, and is currently suffering a third wave of mass infections.

Ramaphosa said the daily caseload had soared 1,500 percent since April, when there were less than 800 cases a day, to over 13,000 in the past week.

“The climb in new cases has been extraordinarily rapid and steep,” he said in his Monday weekly newsletter.

Gauteng, the country’s most populous province and commercial hub, is the epicentre of the latest outbreak.

It has already seen new infections exceed the peaks of the two previous waves.

Army medical personnel are being deployed to help health workers in Gauteng, where Ramaphosa has warned that “hospitals are reaching capacity, and healthcare workers are exhausted”.

Source: AFP

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