Rwanda, South Africa, and Senegal are among the sub-Saharan African countries that have been most vocal in advocating the construction of vaccine factories and medicines to avoid the current distribution difficulties.

"The only way to ensure an equitable distribution of vaccines is to produce more than are needed; as long as Africa is dependent on other regions for access to vaccines, we will always be at the end of the line every time there are shortages," said Rwandan President Paul Kagame, quoted by the Bloomberg financial news agency.

While more developed nations are well advanced in the process of distributing vaccines, most African countries are virtually out of stock and have only managed to give the equivalent of 2% of the world's vaccines, according to data from the African Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.

There are fewer than ten vaccine producers on the continent, in countries such as Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, and South Africa, according to the World Health Organization, and in most of these factories the work is packaging and labeling, not actually manufacturing the vaccines, making the continent ill-prepared to make and administer vaccines in times of crisis.

The suspension of the vaccine patents for covid-19 had already been advocated by some countries for several weeks, but a major development occurred last week when the United States changed its position and began advocating to the World Health Organization to suspend this sales exclusivity that serves to offset research costs.

Almost a hundred countries, led by India and South Africa, have called for the suspension of patents and the sharing of the procedures for creating the vaccine, but other countries and the pharmaceutical companies have objected.

The campaign "is understandable given the past and present experience of waiting in line to receive life-saving medicines and vaccines," said WTO Director-General Nigerian Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, adding that Organization members "must increase production of the vaccines now and also seek pragmatic outcomes" on intellectual property rights protection.

For the president of the Africa Vaccine Production Initiative, "the covid-19 pandemic is a great opportunity to foster the various conversations and proposals about vaccine production and turn them into a guide for action."

According to William Ampofo, increased vaccine production in Africa will facilitate immunization of childhood diseases and control outbreaks of highly infectious diseases."