Good morning, it’s Archie Bland picking up Helen Sullivan’s live blog. (A groodle is what is called a goldendoodle in Australia, I just learned.)
First on Ghana, where the World Health Organization’s global vaccine vaccine scheme Covax delivered its first Covid-19 shots on Wednesday as the race to get doses to the world’s poorest people and tame the pandemic accelerates.
A 600,000-dose flight of the AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India landed in the capital Accra, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations International Emergency Fund for Children (Unicef).
The shots will be used to launch a vaccination drive that will prioritize health workers at the front and others at high risk, according to a plan submitted by Ghanaian health officials on Friday.
“This is an important opportunity, as the arrival of the Covid-19 vaccines in Ghana is critical to bringing an end to the pandemic,” said Anne-Claire Dufay of Unicef Ghana and the WHO country representative , Francis Kasolo, said in a statement. by Reuters.
“These 600,000 Covax vaccines are part of an initial amount of deliveries … which are part of the first wave of Covid vaccines that have led to several low- and middle-income countries,” they said.
The rollout in Ghana is a milestone for the initiative that seeks to close a politically sensitive gap between the millions of people vaccinated in prosperous countries and the relatively few who have been shot in less developed parts of the world.
It aims to deliver a total of 2.3 billion doses by the end of the year, including 1.8 billion to poorer countries at no cost to their governments, and to cover up to 20% of the countries’ population. But it will not be enough for countries to achieve herd immunity and effectively curb the spread of the virus.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Tuesday called on rich countries to share the vaccine dose with Covax, saying the goal of equitable distribution was “endangered”.
“To date, 210 million doses of vaccine have been administered worldwide, but half of them are in just two countries,” Tedros said in Geneva. “More than 200 countries need to administer a single dose.”