FMD: A crisis defined by no vaccine - Andrew Morphew

Key topics:South Africa entered FMD crisis with zero national vaccine stock.Domestic production failed; registered 2022 vaccine went unused.Farmers risked biosecurity due to delayed state vaccine pipeline..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Andrew Morphew*.South Africa’s FMD outbreak will be analysed for years — the spread across provinces, the movement restrictions, the export bans, the culls, and the economic damage to an R80 billion industry. But beneath all of it, one fact defines the crisis more than any other.There was no vaccine.Not in the quantities required. Not when it was needed. And in the months that mattered most, not at all.The most common explanation for this shortage begins with the temporary shutdown of the Botswana Vaccine Institute (BVI) in late October 2025. That explanation is incomplete. By the time BVI stopped producing, South Africa was already in a vaccine crisis. The shutdown did not create the shortage. It made it impossible to ignore.The shortage was already thereOn 4 November 2025, the national Department of Agriculture confirmed to African Farming that it held no FMD vaccine stock whatsoever. Not a dwindling reserve. Not a depleted buffer. Zero.This was an on-record admission by a government spokesperson during an active, multi-province outbreak. Between 30 October and 23 December 2025, at least eight separate reports from major outlets documented the same reality: depleted state stocks, farmers unable to obtain supply, an outbreak response constrained from the outset by the absence of the one tool that could have stabilised it..Read more:.The Dunevax Delay: SA’s FMD crisis isn’t a vaccine shortage — it’s a signature shortage.By October, the Milk Producers' Organisation had already been tracking the shortage and pushing for alternatives. On 8 December, MPO attorneys wrote formally to the Minister of Agriculture, the Director-General, and the Director of Animal Health demanding an import permit for the Dollvet vaccine, disclosure of national vaccine stocks, and submission of FMD strains to the Pirbright Institute. The Director-General acknowledged receipt and said Legal Services were being consulted. There was no further response. By 8 January 2026, MPO Chairperson Luke Gibbs confirmed the organisation had instructed its legal team to prepare a High Court application to compel the state to act.This was not a warning sign. It was a formal legal demand, from a lawyer, to a minister, during a national livestock emergency — acknowledged, and then ignored. The arithmetic that was impossible from the beginning The structural problem was visible to anyone who looked at the numbers.South Africa's national cattle herd is approximately 14 million animals. The BVI vaccine provides protection for four months, requiring three doses per animal per year. That produces an annual requirement of 42 million doses. BVI's maximum committed supply to South Africa was approximately one million doses per month — 12 million doses per year.At that rate, BVI would require three and a half years to produce a single year's worth of vaccine for South Africa's national herd.These numbers required no specialist knowledge. They required a calculator and publicly available figures. The failure to act on them was not a failure of information. It was a failure of will, or attention, or both. BVI was the exposure event — not the causeBVI was established in 1978 to protect Botswana's own beef export industry. It was never designed or mandated to serve as South Africa's primary national vaccine supplier. South Africa's dependence on BVI as its sole source of SAT-strain vaccine was not BVI's failure. It was a structural choice South Africa made and never revisited.That choice was the consequence of a longer institutional failure closer to home. South Africa's domestic vaccine producer, Onderstepoort Biological Products, stopped manufacturing FMD vaccine in 2005. Approximately R492 million was subsequently allocated to upgrade the facility. The upgrade was never completed. The Auditor-General found large portions of the funding unspent and unaccounted for. OBP received a qualified audit.And separately, an opportunity was created and then left unused. The Agricultural Research Council, which falls under the Department of Agriculture, developed a new multi-strain FMD vaccine between 2010 and 2018. On 20 May 2022, that vaccine was formally registered. It was ready for production. The state did not contract it out for manufacture. The registered formulation could have been contracted out to a local private sector facility with the appropriate capability, or to an international partner. Contract manufacturing of registered vaccine formulations is standard international practice. That option is now listed as something being "explored" — in the middle of a national disaster. It was available from the day the vaccine was registered four years ago.What exists at Onderstepoort today is limited production in a facility dating to 1908, using 20-litre fermenters in infrastructure the ARC itself acknowledges does not meet modern GMP standards. South Africa entered the crisis with monopoly control over vaccine procurement, no functional domestic manufacturer, and a registered domestic vaccine it had chosen not to produce. The absurdity of blaming farmersAs the shortage deepened, reports emerged of farmers sourcing vaccine outside the official system. In late November 2025, the Border Management Authority seized a consignment of Kenyan FMD vaccine disguised as Betanol, a cardiac medication. The State Security Agency took over the case to investigate a possible terrorism charge.The biosecurity risk of the Kenyan vaccine is real. But the state's response — investigations, terrorism statutes, criminal framing — addressed the symptom while leaving the cause untouched. At the moment those warnings were being issued, a domestically registered vaccine had sat unproduced for three years. No official responsible for the 21-year production gap at OBP, the unaccounted R492 million, or the failure to manufacture the 2022 vaccine faced any disciplinary process.Farmers who turned to the Kenyan vaccine took a real biosecurity risk. They took it in a vacuum created and maintained by the institutions now threatening to prosecute them. The accountability framework ran in one direction only: downward. Alternatives existed — and failed at specific decision pointsDunevax Biotech submitted its Section 21 application to SAHPRA for the Dollvet vaccine on 5 November 2025. Formal authorisation was confirmed on 13 February 2026. From application to usable permit: one hundred days, during which outbreaks continued spreading.When a private South African company secured an exclusive agency agreement with Argentine manufacturer Biogénesis Bagó, the Department publicly backed the arrangement — while ministerial officials had already told Biogénesis Bagó directly, according to the company's own termination letter, that it preferred not to work with intermediaries. The agency was revoked. The Department denied involvement. The supply relationship passed to OBP — a state-owned entity that had received a qualified audit, still did not meet international GMP standards after thirteen years, and whose government-funded infrastructure upgrade had never been completed.When 1.5 million Dollvet doses arrived at OR Tambo on 1 March 2026, they did not move for six days. A payment dispute delayed their release. Dunevax CEO Dr David Gerber required payment on arrival, while government procurement rules prohibited advance payment. The impasse broke only after personal assurances of payment were given by Minister Steenhuisen, Director-General Ramasodi, and OBP CEO Dr Jacob Modumo. Dunevax proceeded on trust.The prior existence of the 2022 registered vaccine, and the state's failure to manufacture it, became a matter of public controversy through Dr Danie Odendaal, South Africa's most experienced FMD veterinarian and a member of every ministerial task team on the disease since 2016. Odendaal stated publicly that the vaccine being celebrated as a "historic milestone" was not new — developed from 2010, registered in 2022, and never contracted out for manufacture. When Farmer's Weekly asked the ARC why, after the 2022 registration, the vaccine had not been produced under contract while local capacity was rebuilt, no explanation was provided. The one-off production run of 12,900 doses handed over at Onderstepoort on 6 February was, against a national requirement of tens of millions of doses per year, mathematically symbolic.Dr Odendaal was removed from the ministerial task team the following day.No senior official responsible for decisions taken during the outbreak — the hundred-day permit delay, the disruption of the Biogénesis Bagó supply arrangement, or the six-day delay at OR Tambo — has faced any disciplinary process.The sequence speaks for itself. The pipeline that still does not existThe FMD crisis will be remembered for outbreaks, movement controls, culls, export bans, and the economic devastation that followed. It will be remembered for farms silenced, herds depleted, and an animal welfare toll that accumulates quietly behind every headline about trade statistics. Its defining feature, beneath all of it, is simpler..Read more:.Corrigan pt. II: FMD crisis — How did we get to this point?.A national livestock disease response was conducted without a vaccine. Not because science didn't exist. Not because other countries couldn't produce it. Because the system responsible for securing vaccine supply had been eroding for two decades, and no one rebuilt it before the outbreak arrived. And since the outbreak arrived, no one has acted with the urgency the scale of that failure demands.As of today, South Africa does not have a confirmed, uninterrupted vaccine pipeline. The second Dollvet shipment still requires a SAHPRA Section 21 permit that has not yet been signed. Whether a permit has been granted for the second Biogénesis Bagó consignment, or when it might arrive, has not been publicly confirmed. A request for clarification from SAHPRA was not answered at the time of publication. The ARC is producing 20,000 monovalent doses per week against a national requirement measured in tens of millions of doses per year.The Botswana shutdown did not create this situation.It exposed it.South Africa did not run out of vaccines during the FMD crisis.It entered the crisis without a functioning vaccine pipeline — and still does not have one..*Andrew Morphew is a KZN Midlands dairy farmer with a B.Comm Honours (Rhodes). Out of necessity, Andrew now combines farming with frontline agricultural advocacy, focusing on biosecurity and policy. When not on the farm, he is an avid trail runner, reader, and outdoorsman.

FMD: A crisis defined by no vaccine - Andrew Morphew

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