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Africa can expect to see at least 30 percent of its population immunized against the coronavirus by the end of 2021, the World Health Organization said Thursday, as vaccines begin to reach the continent.
Africa is estimated to need 1.5 billion doses of vaccines to immunize 60 percent of its 1.3 billion people, the threshold for herd immunity against Covid-19.
But the continent has lagged behind in the global fight for vaccines, as the wealthiest nations have been accused of buying excessive doses directly from manufacturers.
Most African countries rely on the World Health Organization (WHO) and the African Union (AU) to take over at least part of their inoculation campaigns, providing vaccines and helping finance their implementation.
WHO’s immunization coordinator for Africa, Richard Mihigo, said that the WHO-backed Covax vaccine exchange facility and the AU’s African Vaccine Procurement Task Force (AVATT) will jointly distribute sufficient doses to vaccinate among the 30 and 35 percent of the continent’s population this year.
“Given the latest developments within the Covax facility, there is a very good outlook that the target of delivering 600 million doses by the end of 2021 will definitely be reached,” Mihigo said at a virtual press conference.
Covax vaccines will cover at least 20 percent of the population, with the rest “supplemented” by AVATT, he added.
While the AU has so far secured 270 million doses through AVATT, Mihigo warned that “some of them may not be available soon” and that the initiative “realistically” could only hope to reach 10-15 percent. percent of the continent in 2021.
Most of the Covax and AVATT provisions will be injections of the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine, followed by a few million injections of Pfizer-BioNTech.
Mihigo said the WHO was exploring “additional candidates,” with hopes particularly high for the Johnson & Johnson single-shot vaccine.
So far, only a small handful of African countries have started vaccinating their populations, including Guinea, Mauritius, and the Seychelles.
Morocco is expected to start administering the injections this week, while South Africa announced Wednesday that a first batch of 1.5 million AstraZeneca vaccines would arrive on February 1.
Mihigo said the first doses of Covax are likely to reach the continent in mid-February and that “in March we will definitely see that most countries will start vaccinating.”
“It is a slow start, but we hope that in the coming months things will improve.”
To date, Africa has recorded nearly 3.5 million coronavirus cases and 88,000 deaths, according to a tally compiled by AFP.
A new variant of the virus first detected in South Africa that is believed to be more contagious has appeared in at least six African countries and 24 worldwide, according to the WHO.
