COMPANY NEWS IN BRIEF
Aspen to halt vaccine productionAspen Pharmacare will stop making Covid-19 vaccines at its Gqeberha plant in South Africa from the end of this month due to a lack of orders, a senior executive said, further undermining Africa's already meagre capacity to produce doses.
Aspen currently produces vaccines for Johnson & Johnson. In March, it struck a deal to produce, price, and sell its own-brand version of the shot for African markets.
That deal was considered a game-changer for a continent frustrated by sluggish Western handouts. But, while only a fifth of adults in Africa are fully vaccinated, according to the African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, demand for shots have failed to materialise.
Aspen has had no orders for its Aspenovax vaccine and has not received orders from Johnson & Johnson beyond August.
J&J did not respond to an email seeking comment.
"The thing here is that we don't know if we will get further orders from J&J. But we are finishing off production of what we've got," Stavros Nicolaou, group senior executive at Aspen, told Reuters.
Without new orders, Aspen would have to shut down all of its 450 million-dose annual production capacity, he said.-Fin24