WHO to provide Covid vaccine production know-how to Bangladesh

After South Korea, World Health Organization (WHO) is expanding its Covid-19 vaccine project to five nations including Bangladesh.

It has set up a hub in South Korea to train low- and middle-income countries to produce their own vaccines and therapies, WHO said on Wednesday.

The new training hub comes after the UN agency set up a technology transfer hub in Cape Town, South Africa, last year to give companies from poor and middle-income countries the know-how to produce Covid-19 vaccines based on mRNA technology.

The four more countries which will receive support from its mRNA technology transfer hub in South Africa besides Bangladesh are Indonesia, Pakistan, Serbia and Vietnam.

The new hub will provide workforce training to all countries wishing to produce products such as vaccines, insulin, monoclonal antibodies, the WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press briefing.

Last week, six African countries -- Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia -- signed up as the first in the continent to receive the technology to manufacture mRNA Covid-19 vaccines at scale and according to international standards.

On Wednesday, Tedros said so far 20 countries had expressed interest in getting training on developing an mRNA vaccine by the South African hub.