The Institute Pasteur in Dakar is partnering with companies including BioNTech in a vaccine manufacturing project that could help Africa avert a replay of the past year's lopsided Covid shot rollout.

Vaccine manufacturing has been concentrated in just a handful of countries during the pandemic, and wealthy governments have secured most of the doses, leaving Africa and other regions far behind. Of the more than 8 billion doses given around the world, just 3% have gone to people in Africa, the World Health Organization estimated last month.

The Dakar plant, expected to begin production later this year, is part of a broader effort to strengthen Africa's defenses against not only Covid-19 but also malaria and a range of deadly pathogens. The continent imports about 99% of all the shots it needs; the goal is to slash that to 40% over the next two decades.

The plan is to produce shots using different technologies, in case one is less successful, says Amadou Sall, who leads the Institut Pasteur. The project could pay dividends in other ways, spurring more investment, building trust in health systems, and leaving future generations in a better spot, Sall says. In addition to BioNTech, the institute is working with Belgium's Univercells, among other companies, he says.

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"This isn't a project only about making a vaccine," says Sall, whose facility has made yellow fever inoculations for years. "It's a great opportunity to build a future."

The $200 million project, backed by the World Bank, the U.S., European nations and others, is intended to produce 300 million doses a year targeting Covid and other diseases, helping to ensure Africa is better equipped when the next contagion comes. Yet even reaching that ambitious goal would still leave the continent far short of the vaccine supplies needed to give two doses to each of its more than 700 million adults.

"We cannot afford to fail," says Cheikh Oumar Seydi, who leads the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's work in Africa.

The fast-spreading omicron variant and the global chaos it has caused further underscores the urgency to distribute supplies and technologies more widely throughout Africa, Sall says. As the virus continues to rampage, the risk increases that additional variants of concern will emerge and evade protection from vaccines.

"We see very clearly today that whenever you have a variant, it becomes a problem for everybody," he says. —James Paton