South Africa’s plan to “end” covid 19, opens vaccine manufacturing facility
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has opened a new vaccine manufacturing facility that he says will boost the country’s capacity to produce its own vaccines for diseases including COVID-19 and other variants of the pandemic.
The factory located in Cape Town was also launched by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the South African-born founder of NantWorks, a multinational biotechnology firm based in the United States that has invested about $200 million to start the facility, according to local reports.
“The pandemic has revealed the huge disparities that exist within and between countries in access to quality healthcare, medicines, diagnostics, and vaccines,” said Ramaphosa on Wednesday. Africa is responding to COVID-19 with a “depth of scientific knowledge, expertise, and capacity,” to make its own vaccines, he said.
The new plant aims to reach a goal of producing 1 billion vaccines annually by 2025.
President Ramaphosa in a twit reaches out to the world for similar interventions to address Africans problems in the health sector.
Read his tweet below;
We welcome partnerships with entities like the Access to Advanced Health Institute, the Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation and NantWorks to mobilise investment, transfer technology and know-how, and develop skills. We are already seeing the benefits of this partnership. pic.twitter.com/VLKFlNLi1V
— Cyril Ramaphosa 🇿🇦 (@CyrilRamaphosa) January 19, 2022
