Africa tries to end vaccine inequity by replicating its own

Now they're working to sell the vaccine to everyone down to 5 years old but no supplies to poor countries

Very sad that it has come to this . I’m sure that moderna and Pfizer have already made more than a healthy profit .

Isn't it easier to replicate a conventional vaccine?

Or make an original conventional one.

Yes, but they're not doing it purely for creating the covid vaccine, they wanna master the technology for other purposes as well.

Zoltan Kis, an expert in messenger RNA vaccines at Britain’s University of Sheffield, said reproducing Moderna’s vaccine is “doable” but the task would be far easier if the company shared its expertise. Kis estimated the process involves fewer than a dozen major steps. But certain procedures are tricky, such as sealing the fragile messenger RNA in lipid nanoparticles, he said.

This is the bottleneck of the technology, the procedure is openly described in the scientific literature, so everybody knows the materials needed and the recipe, but without the actual details and expertise it will take a huge amount of time and money to get it right. In some ways Cuba may have done better by not aiming for the mRNA technology and just produce their local vaccine with more traditional methods, it may not be as effective and likely has a worse safety profile than the Moderna and Pfizer's vaccines, but comparing with not vaccinating it is still a huge advancement.

I wish them luck but we all know this "African innovation" experiment will end up like the African aviation videos on YT, only this time with a vaccine instead of an airplane.