WTO: COVID vaccines must be produced in Africa, Latin America

Africa and Latin America have 0.17 and 2 percent respectively of global production capacity, the World Trade Organization’s head said on the eve of a global health summit in Rome, Italy.

The head of the World Trade Organization (WTO) said Thursday that it is of paramount importance to diversify vaccine manufacturing and to have more production taking place in Africa and Latin America to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. On the eve of a global health summit in Rome, WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala told European Union legislators that normal market forces for exports and imports couldn’t apply when it comes to the life-or-death issue of COVID-19 vaccines, as many of the world’s wealthiest nations were hoarding the shots for their own populations when the coronavirus crisis hit their home turf. She said the world has the capacity to manufacture some five billion vaccine doses overall, but that as the virus has spread “we require twice and three times that. So the capacity was not there.”