Moderna will invest up to 500 million dollars to build a plant in Africa that could produce half a billion doses of mRNA vaccine per year, including the one against Covid 19. The American pharmaceutical company, which recently announced who will soon begin work on site selection.
The news comes after the company has been the subject of pressing requests to start manufacturing in Africa, the continent far behind in the overall vaccination campaign and with the lowest immunization data. Pfizer and BioNTech, the other manufacturers of the messenger mRNA vaccine, had anticipated Moderna in July, announcing the agreement reached to begin production in Cape Town, South Africa.
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel explained that the goal is to build a factory comparable to the main manufacturing facility in Norwood, Massachusetts. The African site will be owned by Moderna, which will also manage it, while the staff will rely on local professionals.
Today’s news is also echoed by the words of one of the founders of Moderna, the Armenian entrepreneur and philanthropist Noubar Afeyan who supported the company’s expansion plans, describing them as a way to “launch into the future”. Since the onset of the pandemic, Afeyan continues “to leap forward was a matter of life or death, with the confidence that RNA technology would save many lives.”
Also thanks to the contribution of the African plant, Moderna intends to go from less than one billion doses of the vaccine in 2021 to three billion by 2022.