WHO creates training hub to boost pharmaceutical production in poor countries

The World Health Organization is establishing a facility in South Korea to provide training for drug manufacturing in poorer countries to increase local production, combat chronic diseases and enhance preparation for the next global health crisis.

Officials at the WHO and other multilateral institutions have for the past two years warned of a significant inequality in access to tools to combat the coronavirus pandemic, particularly vaccines. Health experts have said the uneven distribution of vaccines worldwide was largely because of a lack of trained staff and the concentration of jab manufacturing in richer nations.

The South Korean training hub will provide technical and hands-on training in the production of a range of pharmaceutical products, including vaccines, monoclonal antibodies and cancer treatments, the WHO said on Wednesday.

Soumya Swaminathan, the WHO’s chief scientist, said the creation of the training hub was a “back up plan for the next pandemic”.

Vaccine access schemes set up to bring jabs to poorer nations, such as the WHO-backed Covax initiative, have accused richer nations of hoarding doses and criticised a lack of transparency in order fulfilment from vaccines manufacturers — a charge companies have denied.

In Africa, the world’s poorest continent, 83 per cent of the population is yet to receive a single Covid-19 vaccine dose, the WHO said. Wealthy countries have rolled out more Covid booster shots than the total number of all doses administered so far in poorer nations.

“One of the key barriers to successful technology transfer in low- and middle-income countries is the lack of a skilled workforce and weak regulatory systems,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, on Wednesday. He added that the development of those skills would ensure “they [poorer nations] no longer have to wait at the end of the queue”.

The WHO last year set up a hub in South Africa dedicated to transferring technology to help poorer nations produce mRNA vaccines, both for Covid and potentially other diseases. A number of countries, including Argentina and Brazil, have already received mRNA technology from the hub. The health body was expanding the transfer to Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, Serbia and Vietnam, it said.

Swaminathan told the Financial Times the WHO “wants to empower countries to enhance their research and development and manufacturing capacities, leveraging new technologies like mRNA, which have potential far beyond Covid vaccines”.

Mariangela Simao, the WHO’s assistant director-general for access to medicines, stressed the hub in South Korea was also crucial for the treatment of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, in poorer nations.

“We will strive to support the low- and middle-income countries in strengthening their biomanufacturing capabilities so that we could pave the way together towards a safer world during the next pandemic,” said Kwon Deok-chul, South Korea’s minister of health and welfare.