Crisis as opportunity

Corona has shown development potential in Africa.

Text Bettina Rühl, journalist

The international vaccination program COVAX failed: Africa could not be sufficiently supplied with vaccine. Poor logistics and great vaccination skepticism further contributed to the fact that only 17 percent of the population is fully vaccinated (as of May 2022), with only 1 percent in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Kenya, the rate is higher, with just over a third of the population dually vaccinated. During a site visit to the private M.P. Shah Hospital in the capital Nairobi, the head doctor Shamsa Ahmed told me in March that the clinic no longer had a single COVID patient. The positivity rate in Kenya was at 0.6 percent at that time, she said. The crisis seems to be hitting Africa weaker than feared. Nevertheless global vaccine discrimination, as great and justified as the outrage over it was, also served as a brutal wake-up call for Africa, as John Nkengasong put it. The virologist heads the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and had convened a crisis meeting in April 2021: “It was the first summit on vaccine production in Africa. As a result, we have committed, as a continent, to end our dependence on vaccine production. Our goal now is to produce 60 percent of our own vaccines by 2040.”

This is not only about vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, but also against other diseases. Currently, African countries produce only 1 percent of all the vaccines they need themselves — 99 percent are imported. In South Africa, scientists are working on developing the first mRNA vaccine in Africa. In addition, several pharmaceutical companies want to set up production facilities in African countries, including BioNTech and Moderna. The US company was also the first to waive patent protection for its coronavirus vaccine in 92 low and middle-income countries. African governments want to become more independent not only in vaccine production, but also in the purchase and import of medicines. In the first year of the pandemic, they set up a foundation to pay for the vaccine doses as soon as the industrialized countries released them.

Our goal now is to produce 60 percent of our own vaccines by 2040.

They created a task force that has been organizing the purchase ever since. At their recent summit in February, the African Union member states agreed to establish an AU-wide health authority called the African Preparedness and Response Agency, or APRA — an important step for John Nkengasong. “The authority will enable the AU and the Africa CDC to better coordinate the response to future pandemics. Data sharing and the acquisition of quality health data should become more effective.”

Immunologist Kondwani Jambo from Malawi is among the scientists collecting this high-quality data on the continent. Jambo is concerned with the extremely interesting question — also globally — of why Africa has come through the pandemic so comparatively well so far, despite low vaccination rates and weak health systems. “We have found out, for example, that a group of cells called monocytes are also important for the defense against COVID pathogens. We compared samples from adults in Malawi and the UK. The population in Malawi seems to have monocytes that respond much, much faster. So there’s evidence that there are differences in immune response depending on where people live.” Contributing to this scientific data exchange is Congolese molecular biologist Francine Ntoumi, actually a malaria specialist. After many years of research in Europe, including at the University of Tübingen in Germany, she returned to the Congolese capital Brazzaville in 2008 and founded the first molecular biology laboratory there. “My place is here, in Brazzaville. In Germany there are many excellent researchers, my contribution is not really needed there. In contrast, there are only a few scientists here in Congo and this is especially true for my field, molecular biology.”

There are differences not only between Europe and Africa, but also between African countries. Morocco, Egypt and South Africa had many severe cases. In South Africa, this could perhaps be due to the fact that many people are HIV positive.

I hope our politicians have now realized that we need to invest in science. They need to rely on their scientists.

There are still many mysteries about the different courses of the disease. But it is clear to Ntoumi that Africa needs its own answers: “Most African countries have simply adopted what was decided in the North. They did not adapt the measures to the current situation on the ground, did not use local scientists and did not consider together with them how the measures should be adapted to the local situation. On paper, of course, the African scientists were involved in the development of the national Corona strategies, but in reality, this is what happened in Congo: France decided this and that? Two days later we do the same thing and that’s it.”

Nevertheless, many African governments have trusted Western researchers more than their own, Ntoumi regrets. “I hope our politicians have now realized that we need to invest in science. They need to rely on their scientists. And more than that, we need to build trust between African researchers and our governments. At the moment, they don’t have that trust, so they act in a ’copy and paste’ way. We need to change that — for me, that’s one of the lessons of the coronavirus pandemic.” Her Malawian colleague Kondwani Jambo agrees. He too hopes that African governments will invest more in research and science in the future. And that there will not only be sufficient vaccine for the next pandemic, but also strategies for containment that are not simply adopted from the industrialized nations. That the coronavirus crisis was indeed a wake-up call — with positive side effects.

Bettina Rühl

is a freelance journalist and one of the most renowned German Africa reporters. She has lived and worked in Kenya’s capital Nairobi since 2011. For her work, especially in radio, she has been honored with several prestigious media awards and in 2020 with Germany’s Federal Cross of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz).