The World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday said African countries need at least 20 million doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine within six weeks if people who have already had their first dose are to get the second one in time, reported Aljazeera.
“Africa needs vaccines now,” Dr Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s regional director for Africa, said in a statement.
Moeti said any pause in the vaccination campaigns will lead to lost lives and lost hope. According to health experts, there should be eight to 12 weeks of an interval between two vaccine doses to ensure an 81-percent protection rate against coronavirus.
“In addition to this urgent need, another 200 million doses of any WHO Emergency Use Listed COVID-19 vaccine are needed so that the continent can vaccinate 10 percent of its population by September 2021,” the WHO’s statement added.
Africa had registered over 4.7 million coronavirus cases with nearly 130,000 deaths as of Wednesday, May 26.
John Nkengasong, the director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), also made an appeal to the international community to provide the required number of vaccine doses to the African continent considering that it is a global security issue.
“We are not winning the vaccination battle in Africa,” Africa CDC Director Nkengasong said on Thursday during a weekly media briefing in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.
He said forty-three million doses of vaccines have been acquired, of which 23 million doses have been administered so far.
Africa’s COVID-19 vaccination campaigns are facing delays because of India’s export ban on the supply of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Notably, India is the main supplier of the AstraZeneca vaccine to the COVAX initiative that aims to deliver more than two billion vaccine doses to the world’s poorest countries this year. India has stopped vaccine exports as it reeling from a devastating resurgence of the disease.
