In recent months, the makers of popular mRNA vaccines experienced a demand slump that led to costly inventory write-offs. Now, Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing partner in South Africa is suffering through a serious slowdown of its own.
South Africa's Aspen Pharmacare in March struck a licensing deal to produce, price and sell its own branded version of the J&J shot, dubbed Aspenovax. The deal provided Africa with its first COVID-19 vaccine and contributed toward building local vaccine manufacturing capacity in the continent, Stavros Nicolaou, senior executive at Aspen, previously told Fierce Pharma.
Now, with no orders of the Aspenovax vaccine and no new orders from J&J beyond August, Aspen is in a tough spot. Without new orders, Aspen would have to shut down all of its 450 million-dose annual production capacity, Reuters reports. The company originally planned to boost its annual capacity to 700 million doses by February, with further expansions planned beyond that.
Only a fifth of adults in Africa are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It’s a far cry from the goal to vaccinate at least 70% of its adult population, or around 800 million people.
Shortly after the Reuters report, the Africa CDC said it would help stimulate demand for the vaccine, according to the news service.
If orders don’t start coming in, Aspen would be forced to transition its COVID-19 production lines to manufacturing anesthetics, Nicolaou recently told Reuters.
Africa received little help on the vaccination front throughout the pandemic. A year after the first COVID-19 vaccines were administered in places like the U.S., the continent had received just 3% of the world’s vaccine supplies, Nicholau told Fierce Pharma in December.
Demand is waning not just in Africa, but worldwide. Pfizer partner Biovac warned of a slump back in May, while AstraZeneca’s partner Serum Institute of India had about 200 million doses sitting in a stockpile back in April.