“We fought this virus, but we fought it with rubber bullets,” said Mutahi Kagwe, Kenya’s health minister. “But what we have received here is metaphorically consistent with the acquisition of machine guns, bazookas and tanks to fight this war against Covid-19.”
Weeks after many richer countries started receiving their first doses, COVAX started last week, with a delivery to Ghana. Days later, the country’s president becomes the first to be vaccinated in public by the program.
“It is important that I set the example that this vaccine is safe by having the first one,” Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo said on Monday as he launched a nationwide vaccination.
Ghana and Kenya, as well as Rwanda, Senegal, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are among those receiving their first vaccines in recent days as COVAX launches across Africa.
COVAX coordinators hope that this will change soon as access in developing countries continues to accelerate.
“We have delivered 10 million doses in fourteen countries so far, and we will now do at least another 10 million next week and scale up from there,” said Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, said. told CNN. “Yes, not enough doses and not as fast as we would like. It took us 83 days from the first jab in the UK to the fist stab in Africa, but now we’re on our way to getting so much out of it. as we can. ‘
COVAX, led by a coalition including Gavi and the World Health Organization, uses donations from governments and multilateral institutions to buy vaccines for poorer countries that cannot afford contracts with large drug companies.
The program has secured vaccines from AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech and the Serum Institute of India, hoping for additional doses from companies currently working to obtain regulatory approvals. But it was difficult to get enough supplies, in part because richer countries ordered more than they needed.
“The original challenge was that initially large orders were placed that locked up many doses,” Berkley said.
“It is estimated that about 800 million more doses are bought by countries than they need based on their population, and another 1.4 billion options. We therefore hope that some of them will be donated or that they will take their place in the drive so we can make sure we make vaccines available to everyone. ‘
Another obstacle to the rapid delivery of vaccines in poorer countries may be the drug addiction of producers to relinquish intellectual property rights to the vaccines they have created.
“It is time to use every tool to sharpen production, including licensing and technology transfer, and where necessary, renunciation of intellectual property,” said WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said during a UN coronavirus briefing last week.
“When temporary renunciation of intellectual property is raised, we see a lack of cooperation and even serious resistance. To be honest, I can not understand it, because this pandemic is unprecedented. The virus has taken the whole world hostage. taken.”
Despite delays, COVAX aims to make vaccine distribution as equitable as possible. Of more than 180 countries in the program, 92 qualify to receive free or discounted vaccinations.