Africa’s First Coronavirus Vaccine Plant May Shut Down After Receiving Zero Orders

Africa’s first Chinese coronavirus vaccine plant, Aspen Pharmacare, is at risk of shutting down after failing to receive a single order for the plant’s Johnson & Johnson-made inoculation since opening in November 2021, Aspen Pharmacare senior director Stavros Nicolaou told Reuters in an interview published Monday.

South Africa’s Aspen Pharmacare negotiated a licensing deal with the U.S.-based pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson in November 2021 to package and sell Johnson & Johnson’s patented Chinese coronavirus vaccine across the African continent as an Aspen Pharmacare-branded iteration called “Aspenovax.”

Aspen Pharmacare has yet to receive a single order for “Aspenovax” since it opened a plant specifically for the vaccine’s distribution in South Africa’s Eastern Cape city of Gqeberha six months ago, Nicolaou told Reuters over the telephone on April 30.

“There’ve been no orders received for Aspenovax,” he revealed.

“If we don’t get any kind of vaccine orders, then clearly there’ll be very little rationale for retaining the lines that we’re currently using for production,” Nicolaou said of the vaccine packaging and distribution center.

“If you don’t breach this short term gap with orders, you can’t sustain these capacities on the continent,” he added.

“If Aspen doesn’t get production, what chance is there for any of the other initiatives?” Nicolaou asked.

The pharmaceutical director referred to a growing number of efforts planned across Africa in recent months aiming to establish Chinese coronavirus and other vaccine plants on the continent for domestic distribution. The U.S.-based pharmaceutical and biotech firm Moderna (a rival of Johnson & Johnson) signed an agreement with Kenya’s government on March 7 to build its first mRNA vaccine facility on the African continent.

“With only a sixth of adults in Africa fully vaccinated, according to the latest WHO [World Health Organization] figures from the end of March, Aspen’s agreement to sell an Aspen-branded COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] vaccine, Aspenovax, throughout Africa seemed like a sure bet,” Reuters recalled on May 2 of Aspen Pharmacare’s promising plant opening late last year.

The W.H.O. at the time described Aspen Pharmacare’s deal with Johnson & Johnson as a “transformative moment” for the African continent in its supposed journey “towards levelling stark inequalities in access to COVID [Chinese coronavirus] vaccines,” according to Reuters.

The W.H.O., which is the international public health body of the United Nations (U.N.), seems to have misjudged the African appetite for Chinese coronavirus vaccines. This disparity is evidenced by South Africa’s low inoculation rate against the disease, which at press time was estimated at just 30 percent of the country’s population of 60.14 million.