US billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong launches giant coronavirus vaccine plant in South Africa | South China Morning Post

US biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong launched a plant that will produce a billion Covid-19 vaccine doses a year in Cape Town by 2025, which would make it the biggest such factory in Africa and could help the least vaccinated continent tackle the pandemic. Africa has struggled to secure vaccines while wealthy countries were already giving their populations shots. To date just 10.1 per cent of Africa's 1.2 billion people are fully vaccinated. That compares with 62 per cent of Americans and 72 per cent of people in the UK. Soon-Shiong's ImmunityBio Inc. is developing a messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA,…