On 24 February, 600,000 doses of the Covid-19 vaccine arrived in Accra, Ghana.
Two days later, another 504,000 doses arrived in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. On Tuesday, 3.92m vaccine doses arrived in Abuja, Nigeria and a further 324,000 arrived in Dakar, Senegal the following day.
These were the first international deliveries of the Covid-19 vaccine through the COVAX Facility, and – with the first doses administered just days later – the first steps in what will be the largest immunisation campaign in world history. Hopefully, these milestones represent a turning point in the world’s response to the pandemic.
International vaccine campaign
A wide-ranging coalition of international public health organisations and other partners, COVAX aims to ensure that every country, regardless of its resources, gets the vaccines needed to protect its people from this devastating virus.
A large part of the developing world, including most of Africa, has too often been forced to wait for lifesaving innovations and treatments. Because of this chronic lack of equitable access, disease and poverty linger.
COVAX was created at the start of the pandemic to mitigate these inequities. It plans to deliver 2bn vaccine doses all over the world in 2021, including 1.3bn to low- and middle-income countries.
This ambitious international campaign is especially crucial given the deep disparities that have marked Covid-19 vaccine distribution so far.
Until very recently, the world’s richest nations had received almost all of the vaccine supply. As a result, even as some high-income nations have already immunized more than 20% of their population with at least one dose, only a few African countries have reached even one in a thousand people. It is frankly impossible to defeat the virus if these disparities persist. If everyone doesn’t have the chance to get immunized, the world economy could lose as much as $9.2t and twice as many people could perish needlessly.
Africa
