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The Africa CDC director said countries have requested 114 million doses in total and allocations could be announced within three weeks.
Sixteen African countries have expressed interest in securing COVID-19 vaccines as part of an African Union (AU) plan, and allocations could be announced in the next three weeks, said the head of the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
While many rich countries have already started mass immunization campaigns, only a few African countries have started immunizations, and the 55-member African Union hopes to see 60% of the continent’s 1.3 billion people vaccinated. over the next three years.
So far, the AU has obtained around 670 million doses for its member states.
Africa CDC Director John Nkengasong said the 16 countries have requested a total of 114 million doses under the AU’s Vaccine Procurement Task Force (AVATT), which has started its work in mid-January.
“We hope that in the next two to three weeks, they should receive their vaccines,” he said at a virtual press conference on Thursday.
Africa is also expected to receive around 600 million doses of vaccine this year through the COVAX facility, co-led by the World Health Organization (WHO).
In a subsequent briefing, WHO Director for Africa Matshidiso Moeti said nearly 90 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine could start arriving on the continent later this month.
“These doses would help countries reach 3% of their population in the first half of 2021, targeting the groups most at risk, especially frontline health workers,” she said.
Moeti said some 320,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine have been allocated to Cape Verde, Rwanda, South Africa and Tunisia, and deliveries are expected this month.
The COVAX facility aims to help get vaccines for 20 percent of Africans, which means around 600 million doses, Moeti said.
Increased death rate
Nkengasong said the case fatality rate of COVID-19 on the mainland “is becoming very worrying” as it is still climbing higher than the global rate.
Nkengasong told reporters that the death rate on the mainland of 54 countries is now 2.6% while the global rate is 2.2%.
Twenty African countries, including South Africa and Sudan, have rates above the global average, as a resurgence of cases in parts of the continent has a far more deadly toll than the initial wave of infections of the year last.
Africa’s confirmed deaths from the pandemic are approaching 100,000, with more than 3.6 million cases in total.
Nkengasong said that “it would be a tragedy if we start to normalize these deaths”.
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