BioNTech to build mRNA vaccine facility in Africa next year

Biotechnology company BioNTech said it plans to start construction of a messenger RNA vaccine manufacturing facility in Africa mid next year, where it will produce its COVID-19 vaccines.

The company signed a memorandum of understanding with the Rwandan government and the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal. While the company didn’t specify in its release where the first facility would be located, Reuters reported that Jutta Urpilainen, European Union commissioner for international partnerships, said during a media briefing that the first site would be in Rwanda.

The facility will initially have a production capacity of 50 million COVID-19 vaccine doses per year, with that capacity expected to increase.

The company said it will initially own and operate the facility with “plans to transfer manufacturing capacities and the know-how to local partners,” but did not provide a timeline for this transfer.

“Our goal is to develop vaccines in the African Union and to establish sustainable vaccine production capabilities to jointly improve medical care in Africa,” said Uğur Şahin, CEO at BioNTech.

According to the release, “BioNTech has finalized the construction plans and ordered the assets, which will be delivered by mid-2022.”

“State-of-the-art facilities like this will be life-savers and game-changers for Africa and could lead to millions of cutting-edge vaccines being made for Africans, by Africans in Africa. This is also crucial for transferring knowledge and know-how, bringing in new jobs and skills and ultimately strengthening Africa’s health security,” said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, World Health Organization regional director for Africa, in a press release.

There have been widespread calls to increase COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing on the African continent, but critics argue this needs to happen on the right terms and should involve companies working with local manufactures, rather than building new manufacturing facilities so people in African nations can receive the vaccines more rapidly.

Only a little over 5% of the African continent is fully vaccinated, with African nations only receiving about 252.5 million doses in total — as high-income countries hoard doses and fail to fulfill pledges. The G-20 have pledged over 1.2 billion doses to COVAX — the international vaccine-sharing initiative — but only 150 million have been delivered.

“After huge public pressure, BioNTech has finally committed to manufacturing vaccines in the global south. While this is a positive development, it’s far too little, far too late from a company that has made a killing from the pandemic,” said Anna Marriott, policy lead for the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of more than 75 organizations, in a press release.

“Offering to only start building a facility in Africa in the middle of next year that will then at some point produce just 50 million doses — enough for just 2 percent of the continent’s population — is [a] pittance when just one of their factories in Germany produces more than that each month,” according to the press release.

The alliance calls on the company to instead share the know-how of how to produce its vaccine with WHO’s COVID-19 technology access pool and its mRNA technology transfer hub in South Africa.

In July, Pfizer and BioNTech signed an agreement for a South African company to partially produce their COVID-19 vaccine, through the fill and finish process, which involves putting the vaccine — received from facilities in Europe — into vials and shipping the doses. This was the first deal to have an African company partially produce an mRNA-based vaccine. In Tuesday’s release, the company also said it was in discussions with Biovac to expand this South Africa partnership.

This new facility would involve the full manufacturing process, according to the release.

This announcement comes on the same day Moderna announced it would sell 110 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccines to the African Union. Moderna has not delivered any of its promised doses to COVAX, Marriott said, arguing this new agreement is “barely worth the paper it is written on.”

Moderna has also resisted sharing the technical know-how on how to produce its vaccine. Earlier this month, the company announced it plans to build an mRNA therapeutics and vaccine manufacturing facility on the African continent, but has yet to put out a timeline and name a country.