Continental Drift

The pharmaceutical company Moderna announced that it hopes to build a factory in Africa to make COVID vaccines to get the continent's people vaccinated faster to end the pandemic.  Many vaccine donations to Africa have been promised, but few of them have actually been been getting there.

I say that Moderna "hopes" to build a vaccine factory in Africa because the company put out no details of its plans.  Moderna didn't say which African country the factory would be located in, for starters.  Did Moderna say when it would be operational?  It did not.  Did Moderna indicate when the plant would be basically finished - topped out, at least?  It did not.  Did Moderna say when construction of the factory would start?  Negative.

This isn't funny, and I'm sure the director of the World Health Organization, who is from Ethiopia, would be the first to say so.

What Moderna did was get some good publicity, but the company assured no one about its intentions.  Forbes magazine said it best in noting that saying you're going to build a factory without offering specifics is like saying you're going to get married someday without knowing to whom and when.  And Africa needs this factory as soon as possible because the pandemic is killing Africans and possibly causing variants worse than Delta right now.  Many people even believe that Moderna's announcement is really just a PR ploy to avoid allowing the World Health Organization to copy Moderna's vaccine formula for faster production to get more vaccines to where they're needed, which would require a waiver from Moderna's patent.

And, given the vague promises from Moderna, the firm will less likely get a contractor to build its plant and more likely to get Mystico and his lovely assistant Janet to create a factory through hypnosis.  (You have to be a Monty Python fan to get that joke.)

Thus, despite Moderna's non-announcement, the pandemic continues. Meanwhile, in the United States, despite more vaccine mandates, that day-to-day full-vaccination rate continues to increase at a pathetic 0.1 percent.  One day last week, it didn't even go up that much. 😬