Late last year, Johnson & Johnson’s COVID production partner Aspen Pharmacare touted the game-changing potential of its “monumental” licensing deal to make and sell J&J’s single-dose shot in Africa. Five months later, and two months after Aspen started production, the effort has encountered a problem currently familiar to all pandemic vaccine manufacturers.
Owing to a lack of demand—even in Africa where just 15.9% of the continent’s 1.2 billion population has completed a coronavirus vaccination course—Aspen hasn’t received a single order for its branded version of the J&J shot, Bloomberg reports.
“There were a lot of calls both from the West and from Africa that the best way to try and solve the problem was to establish our own local vaccine production capacity,” Stavros Nicolaou, Aspen’s head of strategic trade, told the news outlet. The subsequent dearth of business “sends an incredibly bad message,” he added.
Aspen inked a deal with J&J to help make the company’s coronavirus vaccine candidate back in the fall of 2020. Aspen started training about 500 people to work on the COVID vaccine line at its Gqeberha, South Africa, steriles site, where production kicked off in early 2021. It was Aspen’s first vaccine project, and the company had hoped to expand production to other shots needed on the continent, which imports the vast majority of its vaccines, Bloomberg reports.
In March, meanwhile, Aspen clinched a coveted licensing deal for its branded version of the shot, dubbed Aspenovax. The deal gave the company control over pricing and distribution in Africa, too.
The deal was poised to be a “game changer” on two main counts, Nicolaou told Fierce Pharma late last year. First, an Aspen-branded shot would “de facto” provide the continent with its first COVID-19 vaccine, the executive said in an interview. Second, the pact would go a long way toward building local vaccine manufacturing capacity in Africa, he said.
African governments had hoped newly established vaccine facilities like Aspen’s could be adapted to help fight future epidemics and diseases such as malaria and HIV, Bloomberg pointed out.
Now, Aspen is weighing whether to use its Gqeberha plant to make anesthetics instead, the news outlet reports.
Part of the demand problem comes from the fact that global groups such as COVAX, the World Health Organization, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and CEPI have held back from making Aspenovax orders, Bloomberg reports.
In 2020 and 2021, “we were extremely enthusiastic about buying vaccines manufactured on the African continent by Aspen,” Gavi told the publication. The issue, however, was that J&J chose to send supplies to other regions, the global vaccine alliance explained, adding, “We’re not currently purchasing additional doses.”
J&J took major flak from the WHO and investors last summer after it was discovered most of its shots bottled and packaged at Aspen’s South African site were going to Europe. At the time, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Ph.D., said he was “stunned” by the revelation.
Ultimately, the lack of Aspenovax orders signals a “financial failure,” Abdou Salam Gueye, director of regional emergency preparedness and response for the WHO’s African office, said on a conference call this month, as quoted by Bloomberg. “We will learn from it,” he said.
Should demand for the African-made shot remain poor, the “need for regional manufacture will remain just a political nicety which has no substance,” Aspen’s Nicolaou told the publication.
The world’s ebbing appetite for coronavirus vaccines is weighing on many companies at the moment. Pfizer’s own South African manufacturing partner, Biovac, recently warned it might need to scale back production on mRNA shot Comirnaty thanks to lack of demand.
“It is becoming increasingly recognized that vaccine supply is no longer the primary challenge impacting vaccinating [low- and middle-income countries] and thus manufacturing more doses of COVID-19 vaccines is not the only solution to this complex problem,” a Pfizer spokesperson told Fierce Pharma via email. She added the company had “nothing new to share” regarding its Biovac partnership.
Elsewhere, AstraZeneca’s production partner the Serum Institute of India has said it’s stopped making new COVID-19 vaccine doses as it sits on a stockpile of 200 million.
Just this week, meanwhile, Europe nixed its supply contract for Valneva’s inactivated COVID-19 shot prospect. The company was originally set to provide the bloc with 60 million doses over two years.