Africa’s sluggish uptake of Covid vaccines and vaccine agencies’ decision to buy shots elsewhere is a blow for the company’s production ambitions and the continent’s own health sovereignty. The FM spoke to senior executive Stavros Nicolaou.
You must be terribly frustrated that Covid vaccine orders aren’t coming through.
SN: We’re probably more disappointed. Not just for Aspen but for the continent. Let me clarify one issue: we’re not looking to shut down our facility; we’ve allocated, and we’ll repurpose, two sterile production lines. A cardinal sin in life is if you’ve got production lines, particularly lines like steriles, and they’re vacant. Then you could be making something else.
If this is not resolved imminently we’ll have to repurpose back to what we were producing previously — general anaesthetics and other things. But then the continent loses a very important capacity. Africa consumes a little over 20% of world supply and its stated ambition is to reduce its import dependence of vaccines from the present 99% to 40% by 2040. I’m afraid that if we can’t get it right with the trigger point that is Covid vaccines, then I can’t see Africa hitting that ambition. It will remain forever dependent on external supplies and then we can expect very little regarding health sovereignty.
Who are you lobbying so this isn’t the outcome?
SN: The issue here for me is that you’ve got policymakers that have called for a particular direction to be taken, such as the WHO, because you have to have security of supply. You can’t be in the position where you were 18 months ago. But then you’ve got the agencies that procure these vaccines — Covax, Gavi — not procuring a single dose out of Africa.
We are speaking to them; I can’t say how successful we’ll be. But what I can say for sure is that the fate of Africa and its vaccine ambitions rests in the hands of the procurement agencies. It’s counterintuitive to have an ambition to vaccinate 70% of the population and then buy all the vaccine doses externally; so that’s the first thing we’re calling for. Covax has procured a little over 2-billion doses, so it has doses that are going to come in in quarter three and four, it’s going to be buying new doses then; we can’t see why there can’t be a rescheduling of orders it has in the pipeline to accommodate African orders.
The fate of Africa and its vaccine ambitions rests in the hands of the procurement agencies
— Stavros Nicolaou
Is it quite a swift procedure to repurpose your supply lines if this doesn’t come off?
SN: Because of the nature of pharmaceuticals, nothing is swift or easy. When you deal with steriles it gets even more complicated. It’s not like a clothing production line where you’re making shirts one day and you convert it to jackets. There are a number of regulatory and quality steps that are required here, so once you pivot back to making something else, you lose the vaccine capacity and it’s not easy to restore it later on. And there’s going to be a trust deficit between Africa and these agencies now — anybody else who has aspirations for putting up similar capacity is going to look at this with significant doubt.
Clearly this is a bigger issue than just for Aspen, but does it imply a large financial knock to Aspen if you do have to retool those lines?
SN: Thankfully, we didn’t have to put in huge amounts of capex. We invested just over R3bn to further enhance existing sterile capacity, so a lot of that gets buffered. Importantly, we saw vaccines as a stepping stone into other sterile capabilities that the continent urgently requires. There’s a rising tide of diabetes, for example. The continent is significantly underinvested in insulin. Vaccines are biologics, a lot of oncology treatments are biologics, so we would still move into that in time, but there’s a short-term issue here; you would have segued from Covid vaccines into other areas.
Do you get the sense that as the pandemic recedes, the growth expected from pharma groups has receded too?
SN: I think the way we saw it is that pandemics will come and go. But this gave us the opportunity to springboard into other areas, as I’ve just mentioned. Fortunately, we’ve built this sterile capacity, and it’s about utilising that capacity for future growth.
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