It was John Nkengasong who first saw the opportunity presented by the Covid-19 crisis. In early 2021, the then director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention was boiling over with frustration that, as vaccines were being rolled out across the world, African nations found themselves at the back of the queue.
“We consume 25 per cent of the world’s vaccines,” he says, referring to the shots for diseases ranging from measles and whooping cough to tuberculosis and rotavirus, a cause of potentially life-threatening diarrhoea. “Yet only 1 per cent of vaccines are manufactured on this continent.”
He could see how that made African healthcare systems painfully dependent on overseas entities. Drug companies such as Pfizer and Moderna, operating on a largely commercial basis, were shipping most of their jabs to the US and Europe. Covax, the World Health Organization-backed facility for low- and middle-income countries, was heavily reliant on a single supplier, the Serum Institute of India, which was producing the AstraZeneca vaccine.