Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director, John Nkengasong, on Thursday, said sixteen African countries have shown interest in securing COVID-19 vaccines under an African Union (AU) plan, reported Al Jazeera. He said the vaccine allocation plan could be announced in the next three weeks.
Notably, several rich countries have already begun mass vaccination drives, while only a few African countries have started inoculation. The 55-member African Union (AU) is hoping to see 60 percent of the African continent’s 1.3 billion people immunized in the next three years. The AU has secured around 670 million COVID-19 vaccine doses for its member countries so far.
Africa CDC Director Nkengasong said the 16 countries had requested for a total of 114 million doses under the AU’s Vaccine Acquisition Task Team (AVATT), which started work in mid-January.
“Our hope is that in the next two to three weeks, they should be having their vaccines,” he said during a virtual news conference on Thursday.
The Africa CDC head pointed out that the COVID-19 case fatality rate on the continent “is becoming very troubling” as it creeps ever higher than the global one. He revealed that the fatality rate on the 54-nation continent is now 2.6 percent while the global rate is 2.2 percent.
Africa is also set to receive about 600 million vaccine doses by the end of this year through the COVAX facility, which is co-led by Gavi, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), and the World Health Organization.
During a briefing later on Thursday, WHO Africa director Matshidiso Moeti said nearly 90 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine are expected to arrive on the continent later this month.
“These doses would help countries reach three percent of their populations in the first half of 2021, targeting the most at-risk groups, especially front-line health workers,” she said.
