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Morocco’s Promised COVID-19 Vaccine Remains Elusive as Nation Struggles with Supply
Sunday 4 April 2021, by
The Minister of Health had promised in November 2020 that Morocco would produce its vaccine against Covid 19. At a time when all the countries in the world are procuring vaccines from Asian and Belgian firms and Morocco is struggling to secure its stocks, we are wondering about the Minister of Health’s promise to announce the production of a 100% Moroccan vaccine.
The project of local production of a 100% Moroccan vaccine announced by the Minister of Health turns out to be a hoax. Although holding the gold medal in vaccination on the African continent, Morocco is the turkey of the farce in terms of large-scale acquisition of Covid 19 doses, reports les Ecos.
The Kingdom has already received, to date, millions of vaccines that have been administered to 4,348,995 people as of April 4. Morocco, whose Sinopharm and AstraZeneca stocks are inevitably running out, is being outpaced by rich countries expressing colossal needs for anti-Covid 19 vaccines. They are acquiring the two products that Morocco is subscribed to.
This attitude of rich countries is at the root of the slowdown in the vaccination campaign launched with great fanfare. To mitigate potential vaccine shortages, the Kingdom has embarked on identifying new sources of supply. The Vaccination Technical Committee has recently approved the Sputnik V and Johnson & Johnson vaccines from the Belgian supplier. But the ideal to meet the challenge of immunizing the population is the manufacture of a vaccine of Moroccan origin.
What’s next for the project?
In an interview with the Russian news agency Sputnik, the Minister of Health, Khalid Ait Taleb, had stated that vaccines would be manufactured from a high-tech vaccine production platform built in the city of Tangier. Faced with the difficulty of materializing the project, nothing official is said about it anymore.
What we do know, however, is that Morocco is technically ready to produce its own vaccine, says Abdel Majid Belaïche, an analyst of pharmaceutical markets, who reveals that there are "a number of prerequisites", including the guarantee of having a fast-moving market for the manufactured product. In addition to Majid Belaïche, another specialist, Myriam Lahlou-Filali, general manager of Pharma 5, also believes in Morocco’s ability to manufacture its own vaccine.