A foundation representing the vaccine maker BioNTech has been accused of seeking to undermine the World Health Organization’s initiative to bring covid vaccine manufacturing to the African continent, The BMJ can reveal.

The kENUP Foundation, a consultancy hired by BioNTech, has claimed that WHO’s hub, which is creating a covid-19 mRNA vaccine that African companies can make, is unlikely to be successful and will infringe on patents, documents obtained by The BMJ have shown. Instead, they show kENUP promoting BioNTech’s proposal to ship mRNA factories housed in sea containers from Europe to Africa, initially staffed with BioNTech workers, and a proposed new regulatory pathway to approve the vaccines made in these factories. The novel pathway has been described as paternalistic and unworkable by some experts, as it seems to bypass local regulators.

The move threatens the pan-African venture backed by WHO that seeks to scale up African production of lifesaving vaccines from 1% to 60% by 2040.1 The documents, published for the first time, reveal new details of the proposal from kENUP and BioNTech and their criticism of […]