Global coronavirus cases have begun to decline from record highs set in late January, as new infections from the Omicron variant continue to fall in the United States and much of Europe. Countries worldwide are still reporting more than 3 million infections and over 10,000 deaths per day. 

In South Africa, workers at a technology transfer hub launched by the World Health Organization have produced the continent’s first-ever domestically produced doses of mRNA vaccines. The Afrigen Biologics vaccine candidate was produced using a publicly available, reverse-engineered sequence of Moderna’s COVID vaccine. It was produced without the assistance and approval of Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech after the drug companies refused to transfer technology for the lifesaving vaccines to countries in the Global South.