South Africa opens new vaccine plant

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has opened a new vaccine manufacturing facility that he says will boost the country’s capacity to make its own inoculations for COVID-19 and other diseases.

The NantSA plant in Cape Town – a partnership among the U.S.-based biotechnology firm NantWorks, the government, and South African universities – will help improve Africa’s ability to produce vaccines, Ramaphosa said Jan. 19. 

“The pandemic has revealed the huge disparities that exist within and between countries in access to quality health care, medicines, diagnostics, and vaccines,” said Ramaphosa. But Africa is responding to COVID-19 with a “depth of scientific knowledge, expertise, and capacity,” to make its own vaccines, he added. 

NantWorks, founded by South African-born Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, has invested about $200 million to start the facility, according to local reports. 

It aims to produce 1 billion vaccine doses annually by 2025, Soon-Shiong said. 

South Africa’s Aspen Pharmacare already assembles the J&J COVID-19 vaccine in a factory in Gqeberha, formerly known as Port Elizabeth. The Aspen facility blends the imported components of the vaccine, puts it in vials, and packages the doses, a process known as “fill-and-finish.” It has a capacity of 220 million vaccines per year and is selling them in South Africa and to other African countries. 

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, left, and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, founder of the NantWorks biotechnology company, at the opening of NantSA, the future vaccine manufacturing campus in Cape Town on Jan. 19.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, left, and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, founder of the NantWorks biotechnology company, at the opening of NantSA, the future vaccine manufacturing campus in Cape Town on Jan. 19.

Another vaccine production plant in South Africa is operated by the Biovac Institute in Cape Town, in a partnership with Pfizer-BioNTech to produce 100 million of its vaccine doses annually. 

Ramaphosa said Africa has secured 500 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines through the African Union’s vaccine-acquisition task team, but the continent needs much more. 

“These doses represent only around half of what the continent needs to vaccinate 900 million people in order to achieve the 70% target set by the World Health Organization,” he said. 

In addition to producing vaccines for COVID-19, the new facility will focus on developing products to fight HIV, different types of cancer, and other diseases that may not be a huge problem in other parts of the world, but are major health problems in Africa. 

The new facility will help address public health challenges confronting the continent, according to John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who spoke on a video call. 

“This pandemic caught the continent off guard in terms of access to health security commodities, which are diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics,” he said. “The continent has embraced a new public health order that speaks to the need for us to manufacture vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.”