EU-Africa Summit: Six African countries to Receive Technology to Produce mRNA Vaccines
Six African countries have been selected to be the first set of recipients of the technology to produce mRNA vaccines for the African people following the outcry over vaccines disparity in distribution especially against Africa, a decision reached on Friday at the EU-Africa Summit in Brussels.
The countries are; Egypt, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa, Nigeria and Tunisia. They have been chosen and what that means is they will need to build vaccine production facilities in compliance with the rules and procedures laid down by the World Health Organization which has been clamoring for this since the disparity emerged.
It should be noted that currently, African produces just one percent of the vaccines and just eleven percent of the African population is vaccinated according to WHO compared with the fifty percent from the global perspective.
According to the Secretary of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in his reports at the summit, he made it known that even though ten billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered on people globally, several billions are still unvaccinated.
A plea has been made by Africans to allow local productions of vaccines that will be genealogically produced within the continent to face the local concerns while the same is replicated elsewhere.
But Africa is still at the stage of receiving technology to produce vaccines when little or no technology is required to produce more that enough vaccines to cater for the African segment and probably export elsewhere if the local manufacturers are empowered financially and approved, using locally source herbal produce.
The EU-AU summit was scheduled to take place since year 2020 but due to the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic which wrecked havoc on the global community. It’s coming up at this stage has been perceived as a meeting overdue by experts in the sense that, relationship between the two continents needed a lot of reinvigoration which could only happen through a roundtable among the leadership from both divides.
