How vaccines are made – Daily Nation

A video on social media of two French scientists talking about how they would turn Africans into guinea pigs attracted global outrage.

The topic of vaccines elicits lots of passion in Africans because of historical accounts that go back to precolonial times where care was either withdrawn or pharmaceutical products whose safety was unknown were given to African slaves.

Stories are told of how the French used a toxic arsenic-based drug, atoxyl, on Cameroonians and it killed the patients.

Then there is the infamous case where the United States government let hundreds of black men go untreated for syphilis as part of a research experiment.

One would have expected that discussions of such inhumanity would have subsided by now because of development of ethical guidelines to protect human subjects in vaccine trials. The situation is far from it.

These conversations are still heated in the vaccine space, touching on equality in global health, north-south relations and decolonisation of research.

So how exactly are vaccines developed and would it be possible to turn Africa into guinea pigs?

It is difficult to give a yes or no answer to this question because shouldn’t the well-being of Africans be the priority in these trials?

Well, the development of public health infrastructure in Africa, which involves vaccines and the expansion of campaigns against epidemic diseases, is shaped by broader regional and international political tensions and imperatives.

With little resources to be used for so many health challenges, the World Health Organization (WHO) has prioritised diseases that need urgent attention in terms of vaccines development. They include Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, Ebola virus disease, Marburg virus disease, Lassa fever, Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome, Nipah virus infection, henipaviral disease, Rift Valley fever and Zika virus disease.

In this list, there is also Disease X, a killer that may not be known yet and just comes out of the blue and terrorises mankind like Covid-19 is doing now.

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation is now making vaccines for five of these diseases.

Before it comes to the market, a vaccine goes through six major stages: exploratory, pre-clinical, clinical development, regulatory review and approval, and manufacturing and quality control.

The clinical development phase is what is contentious now because it is where the vaccine is given to people.