Local Production of COVID-19 Vaccines: A Strategy for Action

COVID-19 has lent a fresh lease of life to local production initiatives particularly in Africa. New initiatives, such as the recently announced mRNA hub for COVID-19 vaccines by the World Health Organization in collaboration with the Government of South Africa, and several other projects and programs, are now focusing on creating disseminated manufacturing capacity for current and future pandemic response. This is an important and welcome development for several reasons: it can boost national health security and safeguard lives in regions that have had longstanding problems of access to lifesaving medicines, while also promoting economic development, technological learning, export capacity and regional trade. But current local production efforts raise several serious questions of sustainability. This paper tackles several of these questions: When can we realistically expect production capacity to be built? What might be the potential impact of current efforts to expand supply capacity of COVID-19 vaccines, more generally at the global level, on African investments into local manufacturing? How will these markets evolve at the global and regional levels? Will markets still be available for local manufacturers to tap into by end of 2022 or 2023, and if so, how can we address the technological and market uncertainties related to these investments? What lessons can we glean from local production experiences in the region previously for building vaccine capacity on the continent?