Moderna is Planning to Build a Covid Vaccine Manufacturing Plant in Africa

This week pharma giant Moderna revealed that it has reached a preliminary agreement to build a Covid vaccine manufacturing plant in Africa.

The company is aiming to invest $500 million to produce messenger RNA, the technology underlying its Covid vaccines, at the facility in Kenya.

According to Moderna, it could fill Covid vaccine doses at the Kenya facility as early as 2023 subject to demand.

Moderna reached the agreement with the support of the U.S. government. As the coronavirus pandemic eases in the U.S., the Biden administration has made increasing vaccination globally a central priority.

In the past the company has faced criticism for not sharing its vaccine technology with lower income countries.

The company said in October 2020 it would not enforce Covid-related patents during the pandemic and was willing to license its vaccine after the pandemic.

Moderna has also pledged 650 million doses of its vaccine to COVAX through 2022. It delivered 807 million Covid vaccine doses worldwide in 2021. The shot is the company’s only commercially available product.

Additionally on Monday said it plans to develop and begin testing vaccines targeting 15 of the world’s most worrisome pathogens by 2025 and will permanently wave its COVID-19 vaccine patents for shots intended for certain low- and middle-income countries.

The company said it will make its messenger RNA (mRNA) technology available to researchers working on new vaccines for emerging and neglected diseases through a program called mRNA Access.

Moderna announced its strategy ahead of the Global Pandemic Preparedness Summit sponsored by the UK government and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an international coalition set up five years ago to prepare for future disease threats.

The biotech company is already collaborating with partners on vaccines against some of the 15 pathogens, which include Chikungunya, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, Dengue, Ebola, Malaria, Marburg, Lassa fever, MERS and COVID-19.

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.