Angola has hailed the resolution to lift patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines for developing countries to produce vaccines at Tuesday’s Africa-France summit.
Angola’s finance minister, Vera Daves de Sousa expressed the country’s satisfaction while speaking on Wednesday.
She said, “The motto was set for reflection around giving up intellectual [patents] of vaccines so that technology and knowledge can be relocated to some regions of Africa, so that local production can better meet demand.
“We have to make a self-assessment of our capacity to receive and of the teams to receive this transfer of knowledge. We do not rule out this possibility.”
The Paris summit between African leaders and the France government sought to boost financing in Africa amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The summit also called for the lifting of vaccine patents to allow the vaccine to be manufactured on the continent.
“We are asking the WHO, the WTO and the Medicines Patent Pool to remove all these constraints in terms of intellectual property which block the production of certain types of vaccines,” French President Emmanuel Macron said at the end of the summit.
The French President lamented the slow rate of vaccination in the African continent and set a target of vaccinating 40 percent of people in Africa before 2022.
“The current situation is not sustainable, it is both unfair and inefficient,” said Macron.
African countries have been unable to access COVID-19 vaccines recently due to a scramble for the jabs between developed countries. Also, the increasing spread of cases in India, the supplier of Astrazeneca vaccine, has made the African Union unable to access vaccines through the Covax-backed initiative.
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