Why South Africa stopped making vaccines.
South Africa is one of only a handful of African countries — the others are Egypt, Ethiopia, Morocco, Senegal and Tunisia — with at least some capability to make vaccines. Yet our country is producing next to none.
South Africa has world-class local vaccine-production facilities in the form of the Cape Town-based company, Biovac, which was created in 2003 in partnership with the government as a way to “establish local vaccine manufacturing capability”.