If you’re a poor country, the lesson from the SARS pandemic is clear: You can’t rely on others to fight disease for you. The poor countries have been getting vaccinations for diseases like malaria and hookworm, but the first-world countries still haven’t been able to get a vaccine for something as serious as coronavirus. As the global need for resources increases, many countries are hoarding resources and failing to share them. The United States is one such country. This has sparked a round of hand-wringing among public health experts and caused controversy regarding the number of vaccines per country. If the world wants to prepare for a health crisis of this magnitude, it needs to find a way to more easily share resources with poorer nations.
During the recent worldwide pandemic, countries that couldn’t make their own shots were reliant on shipments from elsewhere. As a result, many countries were reliant on only a few organizations for vaccines. If there were more production facilities, the number of people who could be vaccinated would increase.
Governments in Africa and other less-developed regions want to take the initiative on their own because they feel that they are not getting enough help from the global health system. The fact is that there are a number of problems in less-developed regions, and this is why these countries are taking care of their own affairs. In order to have a decent chance of fighting off the virus, countries need to manufacture their own batches of vaccines.
A facility is being built in Senegal for the production by the end of 2022 of COVID-19 vaccines aiming at manufacturing 25 million doses. Rwanda hopes to attract vaccine production investment. A collaboration was formed in April between the AU and the African CDC, to have the continent produce 60% of the necessary vaccinations before 2040.
