Covax
WHO urges rich countries to pay up for COVID plan
The World Health Organization said the rapid cash injection into its Access to COVID Tools Accelerator could finish off COVID as a global health emergency this...
The Conversation Africa’s Natasha Joseph spoke with Petro Terblanche, Afrigen’s managing director and a professor at South Africa’s North-West University, about what this work entails – and what it will mean for the continent.
Cape Town-based Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines is leading a pilot project, backed by the UN's World Health Organization and the COVAX initiative, which seeks to tweak Moderna's revolutionary drug.
A total of 23 million vaccine doses arrived in Africa in September, a 10-fold increase from June.
WHO epidemiologist, Doctor Impouma Benido, said that a third of coronavirus vaccine doses pledged have so far had reached Africa.
Nearly six billion vaccine doses have been administered globally, but only 2% of those have been in Africa.
The plane carrying over 2.8 million vials donated by the US through the Covax facility touched down at OR Tambo International Airport on Saturday afternoon.
"The agreements, which come at a time when the Delta variant is posing a rising risk to health systems, will begin to make 110 million doses immediately available to participants of the Covax facility, with options for additional doses," said the vaccine alliance Gavi.
South Africa has clearly suffered the consequences of poor strategic decisions to this point. It doesn't need to continue along these lines.
Nigeria -- home to some 200 million people -- got some four million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in March with which it started a nationwide coronavirus vaccination programme.
The United States has come under criticism for sitting on huge stocks of unused vaccines, something the government says was initially necessary as a precautionary measure in its own race to get shots into the arms of Americans.
Covax was set up to ensure equitable distribution of vaccines, particularly to low-income countries, and has already delivered more than 80 million doses to 129 territories.
World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus voiced outrage that a number of rich countries were now vaccinating children and teenagers, while poorer states had barely begun vaccinating health workers and the most vulnerable groups.
The doses, to come on stream from October at the earliest, will broaden out the portfolio of vaccines in the Covax scheme, which has so far been heavily reliant on the AstraZeneca vaccine and hit by delays.
The AstraZeneca vaccines, the first to be provided through COVAX to Egypt, were delivered by plane to Cairo late Wednesday, WHO said in a statement.
The AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine is being produced under licence in India for the Covax scheme, also led by the World Health Organization (WHO), which is meant to ensure that low-income countries can access COVID-19 jabs.
The World Health Organization voiced fears that further waves of the coronavirus pandemic could be on the way if people think the roll-out of vaccines around the globe means the crisis is over.
The COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access platform, also known as Covax last week delivered 600,000 units of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Ghana and 504,000 to the Ivory Coast.
The first lady Rebecca Akufo-Addo also received a jab, one day before the rest of the 600,000 doses are deployed across the country.