Afrigen Biologics: Vaccines for the Global South

The majority of vaccines used on the continent of Africa (99%) are produced offshore. This makes African nations reliant on the West for major health care needs, a problem which was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Afrigen Biologics (in partnership with the WHO) is seeking to lessen this disparity by putting vaccine production in the hands of South Africans and other low- and middle-income countries. Afrigen Biologics is the first in a planned hub-and-spoke model which will extend throughout Africa and South America, allowing local labs to use shared knowledge to produce their own vaccines, particularly the COVID-19 vaccine.
However, Afrigen and the WHO face a number of challenges to their proposed model. First, though Afrigen reports it has produced an original vaccine, the company did use publicly-available information about the Moderna vaccine as a starting point for their production. Long-term use of Moderna’s “recipe” is not guaranteed, as it is unclear whether the company will enforce its intellectual property rights to prevent others from producing a similar vaccine. Second, Afrigen could begin facing local competition from Moderna and other large vaccine producers such as Pfizer and BioNTech. Pfizer and BioNTech have already begun sending modular lab “pods” to Africa to be able to produce its vaccine on the continent. Moderna also has proposed setting up vaccine centers in Africa. The presence of these larger companies within LMICs could threaten the development of the proposed hub-and-spoke model, thus continuing to limit the power of local labs to produce vaccines for their communities. Not to mention that demand for vaccines has recently been low in Africa, making it difficult for any new players to enter the market.