The first anti-COVID-19 vaccination center has been launched in South Africa this Thursday and has been hailed by the chief of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
"This precious project [...] will bring a paradigm shift in addressing the serious problem we faced - the equity problem - during the pandemic, so it's not repeated again," Ghebreyesus said.
The center has already started producing mRNA vaccines on a laboratory scale and is at present expanding and confirming the efficacy of the production of Moderna vaccines on a commercial scale.
Another role of the center is to serve as a guide for vaccine producers in poor countries, helping them to acquire the technologies to produce mRNA vaccines on a large scale and in accordance with international standards, which was emphasized by the WHO in its social media account.
"The Hub will fill the gap in global vaccine supplies by providing low and middle-income countries with equitable access to this life-saving technology," the organization stressed.
According to the African Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), just more than 50 percent of the continent's 1.2Bln people are fully vaccinated against coronavirus.
The project, created with the support of WHO, is being implemented by South African pharmaceutical company Biovac, biotech firm Afrigen Biologics and the South African Medical Research Council.
The South African vaccine center has the capacity to expand production capacity to produce other vaccines and products, such as insulin for diabetes, cancer drugs and possibly vaccines against such as malaria, tuberculosis and even HIV, reports say.