It was early December 2021 and infections from a new coronavirus variant, Omicron, were ripping through South Africa, where 90,000 people had already died from the pandemic.
COVID-19 cases had surged 255 percent in one week among a population in which only 24 percent was fully vaccinated and the country had hit a high of nearly 27,000 new infections daily.
On a windy Monday morning, Dr Caryn Fenner drove the half-hour from her gated community to her workplace, located in an outer industrial suburb of Cape Town. Her pale blue Fiat 500 was the only vehicle driving along motorways lined with powerlines and two-storey warehouses, each the size of a football field, housing coffee manufacturers, freight companies and steelmakers.
Fenner, who is the executive director at Afrigen Biologics & Vaccines, was racing to meet a tight deadline for a locally produced mRNA vaccine. Her facility, tucked between other warehouses selling water filtration systems and spare motorcycle parts, looked unremarkable. Yet revolutionary work was being undertaken inside its boxy clinical rooms. Afrigen was using publicly available information to make its own trial version of Moderna’s COVID vaccine.
When, on November 26, 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) named Omicron a variant of concern, within hours foreign governments imposed travel bans on half a dozen African countries, including South Africa.
The economic impact was immediate. Shares on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange fell almost 2 percent by midday, and the rand traded at its lowest in more than a year.
South Africa itself had alerted the WHO about the variant after scientists from Botswana had detected it among travellers who flew in from Europe. The South African foreign ministry slammed the bans. “Excellent science should be applauded and not punished,” it said.
The travel ban had knock-on effects at Afrigen. Equipment and chemicals critical to developing a vaccine were stuck abroad. The airline tickets of foreign scientists who were flying in to cooperate were cancelled as were those of staff due for training overseas. Grounded flights also delayed the sharing of laboratory samples of Omicron to aid faster research into the new strain. These developments almost entirely halted global scientific collaboration and set Afrigen’s research back by months.
“It was a big problem,” Fenner says with obvious understatement as she sits behind the desk in her small, white-walled office.
She takes a swig of water and a sombre look out of her office window. She is firing off emails on progress reports and presentations. A handwritten note taped to her desk reminds her of Africa’s vaccine goals including that Senegal aims to “fill and finish” 300 million doses annually. Week after week, Afrigen has been working around the clock to reverse-engineer Moderna’s formula. For Fenner it has meant sacrificing time with her husband and two young children.
She often spent nights in the office navigating the grim realities of Africa’s logistics and procurement limitations. Then, one Wednesday evening in January 2022, Fenner and her team had a breakthrough – they had managed to make microlitres of the vaccine – the first copy produced almost entirely without the assistance and approval of the developer.
“If we had the active involvement from Moderna, whether it would have been faster, I don’t know, but it certainly would have been easier,” says Petro Terblanche, Afrigen’s managing director, with a steely expression behind black-rimmed spectacles.
