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HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) – When Amanda Wood, a mother of three, learned that hundreds of coronavirus vaccines were available for teens, only one thing kept her from making it to a high school vaccination site from Toronto – that of her 13-year-old daughter. fear of needles.
Wood said to Lola: If you get the vaccine, you can see your friends again. You can play sports. And drawn to the promise of resuming a normal teenage life, Lola agreed.
In Zimbabwe, more than 13,000 kilometers (8,000 miles) away and one world away from Canada, immunity is more difficult to obtain.
One recent day, Andrew Ngwenya sat outside his home in a working-class township in the capital Harare, wondering how he could save himself and his family from COVID-19.
Ngwenya and his wife De-egma had visited a hospital which sometimes had spare doses. A few hours later, less than 30 people had been vaccinated. The Ngwenyas, parents of four, were sent home, still desperate to be vaccinated.
“We are ready to have it, but we cannot access it,” he said. “We need it, where can we get it? “
The stories of the Wood and Ngwenya families reflect a deeply divided world between the have and have not of the vaccine, between those who can imagine a world beyond the pandemic and those who can only foresee months and perhaps years of disease and death.
In one country, the first stumbling blocks in the fight against COVID-19 were overcome with money and a strong public health infrastructure. In the other, poor planning, a lack of resources, and the failure of a global mechanism to share rare vaccines has led to a desperate shortage of COVID-19 vaccines – as well as reservoirs of oxygen and oxygen. protective equipment.
With 70% of its adult population receiving at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, Canada has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and is now poised to vaccinate children, who are at great risk. lower in complications and deaths from coronaviruses.
Meanwhile, only around 9% of Zimbabwe’s population have received a dose of the coronavirus vaccine amid a wave of the easier-to-spread delta variant seen for the first time in India. Several million people vulnerable to COVID-19, including the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions, struggle to get vaccinated as government officials introduce more restrictive measures.
Ngwenya said the crush of people trying to get the shot was overwhelming.
“The queue is about 5 kilometers (about 3 miles). Even if you’re interested in a jab, you can’t stand it. Once you see the queue you won’t try again, ”he said.
Vaccines were not always abundant in Canada. Without domestic production of the coronavirus vaccine, the country got off to a slow start, with vaccination rates lower than Hungary, Greece and Chile. Canada was also the only G7 country to obtain vaccines in the first round of deliveries thanks to a UN-backed effort put in place to distribute doses of COVID-19 primarily to poor countries known as the COVAX.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada had always intended to procure vaccines through COVAX, having invested more than $ 400 million in the project. The vaccine alliance, Gavi, said COVAX was also intended to provide rich countries with an “insurance policy” in case they didn’t have enough vaccines.
The last shipment of COVAX to Canada – around 655,000 AstraZeneca vaccines – arrived in May, shortly after around 60 poor countries were left out when the initiative’s supplies slowed to a trickle. Bangladesh, for example, was expecting a COVAX delivery of around 130,000 vaccines for its Rohingya refugee population; the shots never arrived after the Indian supplier stopped exporting.
Canada’s decision to obtain vaccines thanks to the UN-backed effort was “morally reprehensible,” said Dr. Prabhat Jha, president of global health and epidemiology at the University of Toronto. He said Canada’s early response to COVID-19 misjudged the need for control measures, including aggressive contact tracing and border restrictions.
“Without the purchasing power of Canada to procure vaccines, we would be in bad shape right now,” he said.
Weeks after the COVAX vaccines arrived, more than 33,000 doses were still in warehouses in Ottawa after health officials recommended that Canadians get vaccinated with Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna instead – which they did. had purchased tens of millions of doses.
The Wood children received the Pfizer vaccine. When Canada started immunizing children 12 and older, Wood, who works with children in the entertainment industry and her architect husband, didn’t hesitate.
Wood said his children, who are all avid athletes, haven’t been able to play much hockey, football or rugby during the repeated blockages. Lola failed to bake lemon breads and chocolate chip cookies with her grandmother, who lives three blocks away.
“We felt that we had to do our part to keep everyone safe, to keep the elderly safe and to revive the economy and get children back to school,” she said.
In Zimbabwe, normalcy isn’t expected anytime soon, and things are likely to get worse – Ngwenya worries about government threats to ban public services, including transport, to the unvaccinated .
Although Zimbabwe has received nearly a million coronavirus vaccines via COVAX, none have been delivered. Its mix of purchased and donated vaccines – 4.2 million – consists of Chinese, Russian and Indian vaccines.
Official figures show that 4% of the country’s 15 million inhabitants are now fully immunized.
Figures make Zimbabwe a relative success in Africa, where less than 2% of the continent’s 1.3 billion people have been vaccinated, according to the World Health Organization. Meanwhile, the virus is spreading to rural areas where the majority live and health facilities are chaotic.
Ngwenya is a part-time pastor in a Pentecostal church; he said he and his herd had to rely on their faith to fight the coronavirus. But he said people would rather get vaccinated first, then pray.
“Every man is afraid of death,” he said. “People are dying and we can see people dying. It’s real.”
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Cheng reported from London. Lori Hinnant in Paris contributed to this report.
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