This content was published on June 18, 2022 – 16:37
Johannesburg, June 18 (EFE) .- The Government of South Africa announced this Saturday an agreement with the World Trade Organization (WTO) that will allow this African country and India to produce their own anticovid vaccines without requesting permission from the patent holders .
This agreement “allows governments to authorize local manufacturers to produce vaccines or their ingredients, substances or elements and to use processes that are covered by patents, without the permission of their holders during the pandemic,” the Ministry of Commerce indicated. and that of Industry, the South African vaccine producers and other actors in a joint statement transmitted to Efe.
For the South African government and other parties, this pact is “a solid and useful basis” to “develop a strong vaccine manufacturing capacity in Africa.”
“Our goal now is to ensure that we address demand by convincing global vaccine buyers to source from African producers,” said Ebrahim Patel, South Africa’s Minister for Trade and Industry.
“This exemption and the other commitments made in the WTO also have to do with preparing for pandemics, to allow developing countries to have the necessary legal tools to deal with variants of covid-19 in the future and in fact, to prepare for future pandemics,” he added.
For Petro Terblanche, CEO of the South African company Afrigen, “the WTO has reached an important milestone by renouncing the intellectual property rights applicable in the manufacture of vaccines.”
“South Africa’s leadership role in this innovative agreement is to be applauded,” said the director of this company that has designed and developed the first South African vaccine against covid-19 using messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology from the same scientific data with which Moderna’s was designed.
In a statement on Friday, Amnesty International criticized this agreement, pointing out that the WTO’s decision on this agreement “does not establish standards that can save lives.”
“More than two years have passed since the covid-19 pandemic and the WTO has still not made the necessary changes to ensure that everyone has access to life-saving health products when they need them most,” said the rights organization. humans.
“Under the terms of this decision, hundreds of millions of people in developing countries are likely to continue to be without access to many of these products,” he added.
The agreement comes after South Africa and India proposed to the WTO measures to suspend the intellectual property rights of anti-Covid-19 vaccines during the height of the pandemic.
During the covid-19 pandemic, Africa was relegated to the bottom of the world when it came to acquiring vaccines against the coronavirus, highlighting the need for the continent to increase the local production of these drugs.
At the beginning of June, the Dakar Pasteur Institute and the European Investment Bank (EIB) signed a financing agreement of 75 million euros to help build a plant that plans to manufacture 300 million doses per year against covid-19 and other diseases in Senegal.
Africa depends 99% on the export of vaccines, which is why the African Union (AU) aspires to produce 50% of these drugs that the continent requires in 2035, and reach 60% of local production by 2040. EFE
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