Aspen Pharmacare, SA’s biggest pharmaceutical manufacturer, is in discussions to expand its vaccine production capacity beyond Covid-19 to jabs for other diseases, CEO Stephen Saad said on Thursday.
Aspen has the capacity to produce up to 1.35-billion vaccine doses at its sterile manufacturing facility in Gqeberha, and is currently using less than a quarter of that capacity to help make Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J)’s Covid-19 shot. It aims to ramp up Covid-19 vaccine production from 300-million to 450-million doses a year by February, and to 700-million doses a year by January 2023, but would still have scope to make other kinds of shots, said Saad.
“What we’d like is to expand production to include other products and have a spread of vaccines,” he said in an interview with Business Day. Aspen had “many opportunities for transactions” and was looking to close “a couple” of deals for vaccines that were used in high volumes in the developing world, including childhood vaccines, he said.
Saad said it was vital for Africa to step up its vaccine manufacturing capacity to improve its health security. African nations import 99% of the vaccines they administer, a vulnerability that left them at the back of the queue when the coronavirus crisis struck and wealthier nations hoarded Covid-19 vaccines made on their home soil.
“Capacitating Africa is an imperative. Unless we do this we will never have security of supply,” said Saad.
Aspen was contracted by J&J in November 2020 to formulate, fill and package vials of its Covid-19 vaccine, and is in negotiations to secure a licence to manufacture the shots. Such a deal would give Aspen greater control over which customers to supply and could potentially open the way for it to make its own active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) for the shots, bolstering security of supply.
A reliable supply of APIs has proven to be a major risk in the provision of vaccines, after a US contractor that provided J&J’s global network of manufactures with these vital components was found to have dispatched contaminated ingredients, forcing the company to throw out millions of doses, including 2-million that Aspen had helped manufacture. The contamination scandal delayed the supply of J&J vaccines to SA and slowed the start of its inoculation drive earlier in 2021, since it left the government with only limited volumes of Pfizer-BioNTech jabs on hand.
J&J currently supplies Aspen with the APIs for its Covid-19 vaccine from its plant in Leiden, in the Netherlands.
Trade, industry and competition minister Ebrahim Patel said API production would give Aspen greater control over the value chain, while a licence from J&J would give Aspen “complete autonomy” over which countries bought the jabs.
“When you have a licensing agreement, the discretion to distribute is in the hands of Aspen, so that would be a step forward,” he said.
Aspen currently has no say in the distribution of the J&J shots it helps to produce, which were controversially split between Africa and Europe in the ratio 60:40 for the third quarter of 2021.
News that shots produced in Africa, which lags the rest of the world in vaccine coverage, were being shipped to Europe sparked outrage among health activists and was condemned by WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
On Thursday, AU envoy Strive Masiyiwa said the arrangement had been suspended, and no more vaccines produced by Aspen would go to European countries.
J&J said it did not direct the allocations of its vaccine within countries nor get involved in negotiations between countries to re-allocate or donate the vaccine.
J&J has a bilateral deal with SA to supply 31-million vaccine doses, and a separate contract with the AU for 220-million doses with an option for a further 180-million.
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