He said: “More than 70 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered so far.
“Less than 20,000 of these were on the African continent. A global immunity gap puts everyone at risk. We need a global vaccination campaign that reaches everyone, everywhere.”
In Nigeria, the government said it was expecting over 40 million vaccines from the African Union (AU) before the end of April, in addition to its efforts to source vaccines from India and Russia.
The Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), Dr Faisal Shuaib, said in a Reuters report on Monday, February 1, 2021, that Nigeria’s request from the African Union increased 4 times after it increased its vaccine capacity from 270 million to 400 million.
“We have applied for 41 million doses of a combination of Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines,” Shuaib said.
He added that Nigeria’s vaccine request includes 7.6 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, 15.3 million of the AstraZeneca vaccine and 18.4 million of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
He also added that Nigeria was working on a payment plan through the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) to pay off within 5-7 years.
The vaccines are expected to arrive by the end of April.
South Africa received its first batch of one million AstraZeneca Coronavirus vaccines on Monday, February 1, 2021 from the Serum Institute of India. It is expected to be administered on frontline workers. A second batch of five hundred thousand vaccines is scheduled to arrive later in February.
The first jabs are expected to be administered in mid-February, after the vaccines are tested and approved by South Africa’s drug regulatory authorities.
In Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, citing poor resources, declared that much of Africa may be left out until 2022 from vaccines.
According to her, “Unless vaccine is seen as a free good on the basis that until everyone is safe, no one is safe — when it’s seen in that context, then perhaps the wealthier nations of the world will come up with a formula that says, how can we share the vaccine with those countries that are under-resourced?”
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