Ugandans will have to wait longer for the Ugandan-made COVID-19 vaccine due to the lengthy research and procedures involved in vaccine development.

In the meantime, Ugandans have been asked to take advantage of the existing vaccines and get vaccinated.

The remarks were made by Dr Lawrence Mugisha, a Makerere University don who is a member of the National Biosafety Committee (NBC) of the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology (UNCST), as well as a committee member on the Presidential Initiative on Epidemics, that is fast-tracking drug, diagnostic and vaccine development in the country, with COVID-19 vaccine as a priority.

He made the call on Friday during a monthly media bio cafe, organized by Science Foundation for Livelihoods and Development (SCIFODE) in partnership with Uganda Biotechnology and Biosafety Consortium (UBBC), at Fairway Hotel in Kampala.

Mugisha explained that when the pandemic was reported in the country, it is the same time, that scientists embarked on the development of vaccines to counter the challenge.

“To date, scientists are at different levels of research, some are at preclinical stages, where they are still looking at molecules, a few have moved a step further into studying rare molecules using small animals like rats, mouse among others,” said Mugisha

He added that when satisfied with the results from the above stages, researchers would then move onto the next phase, which is for clinical trials.

“My advice to all Ugandans at the moment is to take advantage of the available vaccines because they have been made through valid scientific methods and from companies with a good reputation as far as vaccine development is concerned,”  Mugisha said.

Mugisha was responding to a question raised by a participant on the progress of the COVID-19 vaccines being developed in Uganda.

While addressing the health conference at Speke Resort Munyonyo, at the height of the pandemic in Uganda in June 2021, President Yoweri Museveni said the Ugandan vaccine would be ready for use in November this year. A move he said would reduce Uganda’s dependency on donations in terms of vaccines from other countries.

To that effect, the president set up a team led by the Minister of Science Technology and Innovations, Dr Monica Musenero, to oversee the development of vaccines. In a recent interview with Dr Musenero, she attributed the delay to the refusal by developed countries, with reagents or elements needed for vaccine development to sell to Uganda. She however added that with the intervention of the president through Uganda’s embassies in those countries, some reagents have come in and trials are ongoing.

Musenero also added that despite the setback, they are progressing and are in the process of rolling out clinical trials of candidate vaccines, which she said has already worked well among rats. Monica, like her colleague Mugisha, added that the vaccine might not be ready this year.

Although there is some progress, in terms of research towards COVID-19 vaccine development, Uganda is still far from getting the vaccine ready for use, adds Dr Catherine Kyobutungi, a Ugandan epidemiologist from the African Population and Health Research Center, who joined the biocafe on Zoom from Nairobi.

According to her, Uganda doesn’t have adequate infrastructure needed for vaccine development, adding that much as government has set aside some money for trials through existing institutions like the Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI), vaccine development still needs its own infrastructure.

“It is not practical to wake up and say we want to manufacture vaccines from an institution, which already doesn’t have very strong research infrastructure. I think as African countries, we need to do much more if we are to develop a vaccine for the future, so we don’t have to rely on the goodwill of the world and beg for the vaccines.”

What does it require for one to develop a vaccine?

She explained that vaccine development is expensive because it requires infrastructure including experts, to handle the clinical phases, molecules, isolating them, and then have a place where these are stored safely, then progressing tested beginning with small rats before having it tested on the human population. She adds that, the process can only be allowed to progress to the next stage after passing all previous tests.

She also made reference to a paper published in 2018 from her institute that looked at the cost of vaccine development; it estimated that from pre-clinical trials, it costs between $14 million to $160 million if there is no risk of failure.

Kyobutungi added that the death rate among vaccine candidates is very high and is hoped that to get a vaccine there should be three candidates to be tested and when the cost of failure is factored in, the costs goes higher.

“Because if you invested 15 million dollars, into a candidate that might fail, that is 15 million dollars lost so the cost of failure is what makes vaccine development very costly and so from pre-clinical trials up to approval, it is estimated that to get one vaccine candidate it costs about $107 million up to $1.1billion,” she explained.

She further adds that the biggest drivers to these costs are infrastructure used like laboratories, reagents, expertise, candidates used in trial phases in vaccine development among others.

“For a research institute to be involved in vaccine development, it needs about 15 million dollars per year, so if government decided to focus on UVRI as a center for vaccine development, it will have to be given $ 15 million every year,” added Kyobutungi.

Isaac Ongu, the executive director of SCIFODE explained that the monthly biocafe brings together journalists and experts from different sectors to discuss important issues in agriculture, health, environment, climate change among others, that can be ably addressed through scientific innovations.

He added this particular biocafe, was aimed at helping journalists to understand stages involved in vaccine development so as to report better especially now that different countries in Africa, including Uganda, have embarked on vaccine development for COVID-19.