[ad_1]
Monday March 29th, Johnson & Johnson announced that the company will supply the African Union (AU) with up to 400 million doses of its COVID-19 inoculation. Distribution will begin in the third quarter, the drugmaker reported at its press conference on Monday. Distribution will continue until the end of next year, delivering much-needed aid to a continent comparatively lagging behind in its COVID-19 vaccination rates. The US pharmaceutical company can provide up to 230 million doses of its one-shot vaccine to the 55 AU member states starting in April 2021. The remaining 180 million doses will be delivered the following year.
This deal comes after months of negotiations between the AU and the US drugmaker, as well as detailed plans to purchase 270 million doses of vaccines from Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech. However, the status of the negotiations between the UA and the other two companies is unknown. Although the Johnson & Johnson vaccine became available to the public much later than those from Pfizer and AstraZeneca, the J&J vaccine has gained wide acceptance worldwide, particularly in Africa, due to its single-dose injection. In a conversation with Reuters, the director of the African Center for Disease Control and Prevention, John Nkengasong, stated: “J&J requires only one dose, it makes for a very good programmatic implementation.” Nkengasong also claimed that the price of the J&J single-dose vaccine would likely be close to $ 10.
The spread of the coronavirus pandemic has hit the African continent particularly hard, and with the increasing cases of new African variants on the continent, controlling the spread has been especially difficult. According to the African Centers for Disease Control (CDC), at least 40 AU member states have now seen a second wave of the pandemic, including all countries in southern Africa. A press release from the CDC says: “This new wave of infections is believed to be associated with the emergence of variants that are more transmissible.” New, more communicable variants that originated in South Africa have now spread northward and continue to pose new challenges for state and local governments trying to control transmission. Elsewhere in Africa, the South African variant has been officially recorded in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Comoros, Zambia, Mozambique, and Tanzania. The variant is suspected to have reached other countries on the continent, but the fragile infrastructure across the continent has made it difficult to register. This, combined with the political turmoil and economic instability facing many African countries, has made the spread almost impossible to contain.
According to the WHO, “The initial analysis indicates that the [South African] variant … it can spread more easily between people. “However, the variant is not known to cause more serious disease. However, the problem lies in the protection offered by the three currently approved vaccines. New studies, including one from the University of the Witwatersrand, have shown that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, the first approved in South Africa, offers very little protection against mild to moderate cases of coronavirus arising from the new strain. However, these studies have yet to investigate the efficacy of inoculation in preventing more serious infections.
Despite this, within South Africa and on the continent, there has been a 40% increase in the number of reported deaths in recent months. According to the WHO, the total number of deaths on the continent has reached 100,000. In Nigeria, researchers have also identified a new variant of COVID-19. The ramifications of that remain to be seen. There are large disparities in testing rates across the continent; some countries have reduced testing while others have maintained or increased the amount of testing during the pandemic. According to many CDC officials, widespread vaccination is of the utmost importance in stopping increased transmission and more deaths across the continent. While applauding the agreement reached with J&J, experts indicate the need for similar agreements to be made with the other two major COVID-19 vaccine producers, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, to prevent further spread and death.
[ad_2]
