Africa CDC calls out Moderna for 'abandoning' vaccine equity commitment

American-based pharmaceutical company Moderna announced last week that it’s putting plans to build a messenger RNA vaccine manufacturing facility in Kenya on hold.

In a strongly-worded response to this move, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said the company is “abandoning a commitment to build highly needed and relevant vaccine manufacturing capabilities in Africa.”

Moderna announced plans to build the facility in late 2021 — the first company to announce plans to fully manufacture mRNA substance in Africa. It said it expected to produce up to 500 million vaccine doses annually for both COVID-19 and other conditions.

The company had planned to invest $500 million in the facility. At the time, Stéphane Bancel, chief executive officer at Moderna, said it was a move to “extend Moderna’s societal impact.”

Moderna’s announcement was celebrated as a step toward helping the African continent’s population achieve health security.

But over two years later, Moderna said its decision to not move forward with these plans is because the demand for COVID-19 vaccines has declined since the pandemic to a point that is "insufficient to support the viability of the factory planned in Kenya."

The company hasn’t received any vaccine orders for Africa since 2022 and previous orders were canceled, which resulted in $1 billion in losses and write-downs, it said.

The company is working on the development of other mRNA vaccines, such as for malaria and HIV, but these vaccines are early in development. At this point in time, the company said it needs to determine the “future demand for mRNA vaccines on the African continent.”

“This approach will allow Moderna to better align its infrastructure investments with the evolving healthcare needs and vaccine demand in Africa,” the company said in a statement.

But these justifications didn’t land well with Africa CDC — a pan-African public health agency that has made increasing the amount of pharmaceutical production on the continent a leading priority.

“To blame Africa and Africa CDC for lack of demand for covid-19 vaccines and therefore the reason to put on hold plans to manufacture vaccines in Africa, only serves to perpetuate the inequity that characterized the response to the Covid–19 pandemic,” the statement read.

Global inequity in the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines led to lowered demand by the time these vaccines reached Africa, the agency wrote. Additionally, when the African Union bought COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic, Moderna vaccines were not made available for purchase to the continent — despite their attempts to buy. Less than 5% of the COVID-19 vaccines administered in Africa were from Moderna.

Africa CDC also said other companies have followed through on their commitments to Africa. For example, last December German biotechnology company BioNTech unveiled its new $150 million modular mRNA vaccine manufacturing facility in Kigali — the company’s first in Africa — even though it has reportedly scaled back its manufacturing plans for the continent.

Their decision demonstrates Moderna isn’t committed to “vaccine equity and access to vaccines,” Africa CDC wrote.

Moderna has also received criticism for its decision not to support the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 mRNA technology transfer hub in South Africa — pushing the hub to develop its own vaccine.