African vaccines industry set to produce 60% doses by 2040: Macron

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The African vaccine manufacturing industry is expected to supply over 60% of the total vaccine doses required on the continent by 2040, up from around 2% now, French president Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday.

Macron was speaking at the Global Forum for Vaccine Sovereignty and Innovation at the Quai d’Orsay, in Paris as part of World Immunisation Week.

A funded $1 billion scheme to boost vaccine production in Africa, the African Vaccine Manufacturing Accelerator, will be launch during the meeting.

The mechanism aims to address the inequality in access to vaccines that plagued the continent during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as to use domestically produced shots to tackle diseases that kill hundreds of thousands of African children every year, such as cholera and malaria.