‘THIS IS INSANE’
Less than 1 percent of Africans fully vaccinated against COVID-19
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — In the global race to vaccinate people against COVID-19, Africa is tragically at the back of the pack.
In fact, it has barely gotten out of the starting blocks.
In South Africa, which has the continent’s most robust economy and its biggest coronavirus caseload, just 0.8 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, according to a worldwide tracker kept by Johns Hopkins University. And hundreds of thousands of the country’s health workers, many of whom come face-to-face with the virus every day, are still waiting for their shots.
In Nigeria, Africa’s biggest country with more than 200 million people, only 0.1 percent are fully protected. Kenya, with 50 million people, is even lower. Uganda has recalled doses from rural areas because it doesn’t have nearly enough to fight outbreaks in big cities.
Chad didn’t administer its first vaccine shots until this past weekend. And at least five other countries in Africa haven’t put one dose into an arm, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The World Health Organization says the continent of 1.3 billion people is facing a severe shortage of vaccine at the same time a new wave of infections is rising across Africa. The shortfall is estimated at 700 million doses. And vaccine shipments to the continent have ground to a “near halt,” WHO said last week.
“It is extremely concerning and at times frustrating,” said Africa CDC Director Dr. John Nkengasong, a Cameroonian virologist who’s trying to ensure some of the world’s poorest nations get a fair share of vaccines in a marketplace where they can’t possibly compete.
The United States and Britain, in contrast, have fully vaccinated more than 40 percent of their populations, with higher rates for adults and high-risk people.
Other Western countries are near or past 20 percent coverage, and their citizens are starting to think about where their vaccine certificates might take them on their summer vacations. The U.S., France and Germany are even offering shots to youngsters, who are at very low risk of serious illness from COVID-19.
Poorer countries had warned as far back as last year of this impending vaccine inequality, fearful that rich nations would hoard doses.
Nkengasong called on the leaders of wealthy nations meeting this week at the Group of Seven summit to share spare vaccines — something the United States has already agreed to do — and avert a “moral catastrophe.”
“I’d like to believe that the G-7 countries, most of them having kept excess doses of vaccines, want to be on the right side of history,” Nkengasong said. “Distribute those vaccines. We need to actually see these vaccines, not just … promises and goodwill.”
Others are not so patient, nor so diplomatic.
“People are dying. Time is against us. This IS INSANE,” South African human rights lawyer Fatima Hasan, an activist for equal access to health care, wrote in a series of text messages. The Biden administration made its first major move to ease the crisis last week, announcing it would share an initial batch of 25 million spare doses with desperate countries in South and Central America, Asia and Africa.
Then, on Wednesday, a person familiar with the matter said the U.S. will buy 500 million more doses of the Pfizer vaccine that will be donated through the U.N.-backed COVAX program to 92 lower-income countries and the African Union over the next year.
President Joe Biden was set to make the announcement Thursday before the start of the G-7 summit.
Billionaire British philanthropist Mo Ibrahim, who was born in Sudan, added his voice to the issue Tuesday, saying the pandemic-era phrase “Nobody is safe until everybody is safe” — often repeated by leaders of wealthy nations — will be meaningless until they share their excess vaccine.
“They say that while they are hoarding the vaccine,” Ibrahim said. “Can you walk the talk? Stop just talking like parrots, you know, and do you really mean what you said?”