The launch of the Nant South Africa vaccine manufacturing campus on Wednesday marks the inception of the first facility on the African continent where vaccines will be produced from scratch.
The long-standing inequities in vaccine development and access have been thrown into sharp relief by the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now more than ever, South Africa supports vaccine manufacturing in Africa to ensure that the continent becomes self-sufficient and sheds “those colonial chains” that have previously bound it.
These were the words of President Cyril Ramaphosa as he stood beneath the harsh lights of a vast and yet-to-be outfitted facility at the launch of the Nant South Africa vaccine manufacturing campus in Brackengate, Cape Town, on Wednesday.
“Africa should no longer be the last in line to access vaccines against pandemics. Africa should no longer go, hat in hand, to the Western world, begging and begging for vaccines that they just want to drip off from their tables,” said Ramaphosa. “We will stand on our own. This we are determined to do and this facility is proof of that.”
Nant South Africa, along with NantAfrica and Nant Botswana, was established in 2021 to participate in a coalition of organisations…
