WHO Director-General's opening remarks at the Briefing to the African Union Ambassadors in Geneva on Strengthening Local Manufacturing Capacity – 14 April 2022

Your Excellency Ambassador Thabang Matjama, chair of the Group of African Union Ambassadors Geneva,

Your Excellencies, dear colleagues and friends,

Just over two years since COVID-19 began spreading, there are now multiple safe and effective vaccines against it, and more than 10 billion doses have been administered globally.

Unfortunately, billions of people are yet to benefit from these life-saving tools.

More than 80% of the population of Africa is yet to receive a single dose.

Much of this inequity has been driven by the fact that globally, vaccine production is concentrated in a few mostly higher-income countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown vulnerabilities in medical product supply chains dependent on a small number of manufacturers for raw materials and finished products.

We must learn the lessons the pandemic is teaching us.

One of the most obvious is the urgent need to increase local production of vaccines, especially in low- and middle-income countries.

The diversification of production is key to having a reliable supply of safe and efficacious medicines, vaccines and other health products.

In February, I visited South Africa, where I met with President Ramaphosa and saw first-hand the progress underway at the WHO mRNA vaccine technology transfer Hub.

The commitment from the government and the private sector is real.

In fact, it is already producing results, with Afrigen's announcement that it has produced its own mRNA vaccine candidate.

I also visited Biovac, which is one of the spokes, and which will receive technology from Afrigen.

I was impressed by the capacity of this public private partnership and I am confident that the countries of Africa will be able to produce vaccines and biologics at scale.

This is only the beginning. On the African continent, we have announced spokes in Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tunisia.

Yesterday, I met with some of the ambassadors from those countries to review our progress. I am encouraged by the commitment of these governments to advancing the development of the hubs.

The mRNA Hub is a truly historic initiative, and it comes at a critical moment.

We believe that the mRNA technology transfer hub holds huge promise, not just for increasing access to vaccines against COVID-19 but also for other diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis and cancer.

By improving access to quality-assured medical products, local production can take us further down the road to universal health coverage and help to achieve the health-related targets of the Sustainable Development Goals.

This will not only make the world healthier and more resilient, it will also create jobs and economic opportunity.

We encourage all countries in the region to work together with the help of WHO to develop a coherent plan for production and procurement.

WHO looks forward to working closely with the African Medicines Agency, which will play a crucial regulatory role by working to ensure safety and quality. We are already providing technical and financial support to the African Medicines Agency, and also to Africa CDC.

A second important step is the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool, known as C-TAP, which promotes voluntary mechanisms to share intellectual property, know-how, and data.

Getting through this pandemic and building the resources to take on future health threats, requires that we work across the private and public sectors for the greater good.

C-TAP will soon launch an open database of key COVID-19 products, including patent status and licensing information.

At the same time, we are closely following the waiver proposed by South Africa and India and the ongoing discussions in the WTO's TRIPS Council.

We need meaningful solutions that will allow quality-assured manufacturers in low- and middle-income countries to produce these life-saving technologies.

After all, what is the purpose of having powerful new health technologies if the people that need them most cannot access them?

I would also like to add that in February in Marburg, Germany I attended the launch of the new BioNTech initiatives with Ghana, Rwanda and Senegal, which are investing in mRNA.

We would like to include Ghana and Rwanda in the WHO network of spokes in order to have synergies and better coordination.

We also welcome the recently announced Moderna initiative in Kenya.

We hope that we can collaborate with both of them in areas such a regulatory strengthening and workforce capacity building.

In closing, let me leave you with three priorities:

First, I would like to encourage all countries in the region to work together with the help of WHO to develop a coherent plan for production and procurement.

Second, to strike the right balance between investing in smaller, more agile facilities, and larger facilities with more capacity, but also more expense.

Finally, I urge you to support the important work of the African Medicines Agency.

I will now hand over the floor to my colleagues who will be able to fill you in on the details

I thank you.

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