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Giant coronavirus vaccine plant launched in South Africa by US billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong
- The billion-dose factory would be the largest on the continent, which struggled to secure shots while rich nations were already inoculating their populations
- Soon-Shiong’s biotech firm is developing a mRNA jab that it hopes will be used as a universal booster for earlier doses
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US biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong launched a plant that will produce a billion Covid-19 vaccine doses a year in Cape Town by 2025, which would make it the biggest such factory in Africa and could help the least vaccinated continent tackle the pandemic.
Africa has struggled to secure vaccines while wealthy countries were already giving their populations shots. To date just 10.1 per cent of Africa’s 1.2 billion people are fully vaccinated. That compares with 62 per cent of Americans and 72 per cent of people in the UK.
Soon-Shiong’s ImmunityBio Inc. is developing a messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA, Covid-19 vaccine that it hopes will be used as a universal booster for earlier shots and may help end the pandemic by targeting the nucleocapsid protein at the core of the coronavirus, which is less prone to mutation than the spike proteins targeted by other shots.
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His South African venture came about after talks with Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of the country.
“We want to manufacture this in Africa for Africa and export it to the world,” Soon-Shiong, who was born in the South African city of Gqeberha, said at a press conference on Wednesday. “President Ramaphosa said ‘come home, we will make this happen’.”
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