GENEVA (Washington Insider Magazine) – The World Health Organization is establishing a worldwide training center to assist developing nations in developing vaccinations, antibodies, and cancer medications using the same messenger RNA technique that was used to develop COVID-19 vaccines.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the new center would be in South Korea and it will share mRNA technology created by WHO and collaborators in South Africa, where researchers are attempting to replicate the COVID-19 vaccine produced by Moderna Inc. during a news conference in Geneva on Wednesday. That work is being carried out without the assistance of Moderna.
According to ABC NEWS, this is the first instance WHO has backed such unconventional attempts to reverse-engineer a commercially marketed vaccine, thereby circumventing the pharmaceutical sector, which has largely favored providing affluent nations over poor nations in both sales and manufacture.
The producers of the two approved mRNA COVID-19 vaccinations, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, have refused to provide their vaccine formula or technical expertise with WHO and its collaborators.
The WHO stated that the shared knowledge would be valuable not just in developing coronavirus vaccines, but also in developing insulin, antibodies, and therapies for diseases such as cancer and malaria.
Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, WHO’s chief scientist, estimated that recreating Moderna’s vaccine will take until around late next year or maybe 2024 to produce usable injections, but that time scale might be cut in half if the manufacturer agreed to cooperate.
Access to COVID-19 vaccinations is quite uneven over the world. Only 1% of the world’s COVID-19 immunizations are produced in Africa, and only around 11% of the population is inoculated. A European country like Portugal, on the other hand, has 84 percent of its population completely vaccinated, with over 59 percent receiving a booster dose.
Six African nations — South Africa, Tunisia, Egypt, Senegal, Nigeria, and Kenya — were given the expertise and scientific know-how to create mRNA COVID-19 vaccines the other week, according to WHO. Tedros announced on Wednesday that the South African hub will now serve 5 more nations: Vietnam, Serbia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Pakistan.
Earlier this year, a Cape Town firm aiming to recreate Moderna Inc.’s COVID-19 injection said that it has created a prototype vaccine that will shortly begin laboratory testing.
Moderna’s vaccine, according to researchers working on it, has more data available in the public domain and is thought to be significantly easier to develop than Pfizer- BioNTech’s.
WHO’s initiatives will address the massive worldwide demand for mRNA vaccinations, which have proved to be perhaps the most successful at controlling COVID-19, according to Zain Rizvi, director of research at the advocacy organization Public Citizen.
Rizvi urged the Biden government to put pressure on multinational pharmaceutical manufacturers to disclose their COVID-19 vaccine formulations and expertise.
