Why South Africa stopped making vaccines 6 May 2021 Vaccinating the globe: Workers on the Covid-19 vaccine production line at the Serum Institute of India in Pune. The factory is making the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccination. Photo: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg/Getty Images Yet our country is producing next to none. South Africa has world-class local vaccine-production facilities in the form of the Cape Town-based company, Biovac, which was created in 2003 in partnership with the government as a way to “establish local vaccine manufacturing capability”. And although Biovac is putting a process in place to produce the pharmaceutical company, Sanofi Pasteur’s six-in-one jab, Hexaxim, as well as Pfizer’s Prevnar 13, it has not yet produced any vaccine from start to finish in two decades of existence. (Hexaxim protects children against diseases such as hepatitis B, polio, tetanus and whooping cough and Prevnar 13 prevents middle-ear infection in children and certain types of pneumonia).