In the race to vaccinate the world against Covid-19, developing countries are lagging behind dangerously because mutations in the virus are making it harder to catch up – a situation that could at least another year of humanitarian and economic misery for poor countries cause.
The US has now administered about 12% of its population vaccine doses, while Europe has reached about 5%. But in South America, only 1.8% of the population received a vaccine this week, while Asia reached 1.5% and Africa 0.1%, according to Our World in Data, a project at the University of Oxford based.
Nearly 130 countries need to administer another dose, the World Health Organization said recently. Only two countries in sub-Saharan Africa – the Seychelles and Mauritius – have vaccinated a significant proportion of frontline workers, although others are likely to roll out shots in the coming days.
The critical shortage of vaccines for poorer countries can be further limited by the emergence of new variants of the virus, also in South Africa and Brazil, which seem to make some of the safest vaccines less effective. It is likely that large parts of Africa and some countries in Latin America and Asia will not cover most of their populations before 2023 or 2024.
All that means could be years before life returns to normal in poorer countries, where more than 100 million people fell into extreme poverty last year and who do not have enough resources to unleash government spending as much as rich countries. . Some emerging market countries that were able to get their boost last year do not have enough resources to continue.