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The US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which represents the world’s biggest financial commitment to fight a single disease, is committed to having tests and vaccines made on the African continent, a US official said.
The more than $100 billion program is pressing African nations to adopt the right regulations to allow the manufacture and procurement of medicines made on the continent, its head, John Nkengasong, said. It’s also pressing global health bodies to buy medications in Africa to fight the pandemic there.
“We have been in discussions with the Global Fund,” an organization that spends more than $5 billion a year to fight HIV Aids, tuberculosis and malaria, he said in an interview in the South African capital, Pretoria, on Wednesday. “I’ve championed that drive to procure locally,” said Nkengasong, who also sits on the fund’s board.
Two-thirds of those infected with HIV globally, which kills more than 600 000 people a year, are in Africa. South Africa has medicine and vaccine plants, as do Senegal and Egypt. And while a vaccine for HIV has yet to be developed, there are medicines that can counteract its spread.
Pepfar has met with Gilead Sciences over making its twice-yearly experimental HIV prevention drug lenacapavir available in Africa, Nkengasong said.
In a sign that such lobbying efforts were working, the company said Wednesday it has licensed its production to six generic makers, after coming under fire from HIV advocates who argued it was prioritizing profit over patients.
Pepfar cannot build a manufacturing plant, but it can help shape regulations and influence procurement decisions, Nkengasong said. “What we are trying to do is guarantee volumes.”
“The issue is access and scale and impact,” Nkengasong said. “Your product can be the best in the world but as long as it doesn’t get into the arms it makes no sense,” he said.
Pepfar was initiated in 2003 by then President George W. Bush. It has saved 25 million lives and prevented millions of infections, the program says on its website.
South Africa has the biggest population of people with HIV with 7.8 million infected with the virus, or about one in eight people in the country.
“The greatest burden of HIV Aids in the world is in South Africa and South Africa has come a long way in the fight against HIV Aids, but still has a long way to go to bring this silent pandemic to an end,” Nkengasong said.
