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“We fought this virus, but we fought it with rubber bullets,” Kenya Health Minister Mutahi Kagwe said. “But what we have received here is tantamount, metaphorically speaking, to 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 kicked off last week starting with delivery to Ghana. Days later, the country’s president became the first to be publicly vaccinated under the program.
“It is important that I set an example that this vaccine is safe by being the first to have it,” Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo said on Monday, launching a nationwide vaccination campaign.
Ghana and Kenya, along with Rwanda, Senegal, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are among those who have received their first vaccines in recent days as COVAX rolls out across the country. ‘Africa.
COVAX coordinators hope this will change soon as access in developing countries continues to accelerate.
“We have so far delivered 10 million doses to fourteen countries, and we will now do at least an additional 10 million next week and scale up from there,” Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance , told CNN. “So yeah, not enough doses and not as fast as we would like. It took us 83 days from the first shot in UK to the first shot in Africa, but now we’re off to try and get some. as much. as we can. ”
COVAX, led by a coalition including Gavi and the World Health Organization, uses donations from governments and multilateral institutions to purchase vaccines for poorer countries that cannot afford to contract with large corporations pharmaceuticals.
The program has obtained vaccines from AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech and the Serum Institute of India, in hopes of receiving additional doses from companies currently working to obtain regulatory approvals. But it has been difficult to get enough supplies, in part because richer countries have ordered more than they need.
“The initial challenge was that initially large controls were put in place that blocked many doses,” Berkley said.
“It is estimated that there are about 800 million more doses purchased by countries than they need based on their population, and 1.4 billion more options. So we hope some of them will either be donated or they will free up their place in the queue, so that we can make sure that we make the vaccines available to everyone. ”
Another obstacle to the rapid delivery of vaccines to poorer countries may be the reluctance of drug manufacturers to relinquish some intellectual property rights to the vaccines they have created.
“The time has come to use all tools to increase production, including licensing and technology transfer, and if necessary, intellectual property waivers,” said WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, during a UN briefing on the coronavirus last week.
“When the temporary IP waiver is raised, we see a lack of cooperation and even serious resistance. To be honest, I cannot understand this because this pandemic is unprecedented. The virus has taken hold of the whole world. hostage.”
Despite the delays, COVAX aims to make vaccine distribution as fair as possible. Of the more than 180 countries participating in the program, 92 are eligible to receive free or discounted vaccines.
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