“We fought this virus, but we fought it with rubber bullets,” said Kenyan Health Minister Mutahi Kagwe. “But what we have received here is equivalent, metaphorically speaking, to the purchase of machine guns, bazookas and tanks to fight this war against Covid-19.”
A few weeks after many richer countries began receiving their first doses, COVAX began last week with a delivery to Ghana. Days later, the country’s president became the first to be publicly vaccinated through the program.
“It is important to set an example that this vaccine is safe, being the first to receive it,” Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo said on Monday, launching a nationwide vaccine.
Ghana and Kenya, as well as Rwanda, Senegal, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are among those who have received the first vaccines in recent days as COVAX is deployed across Africa.
COVAX coordinators hope that it will soon change as access to developing countries continues to accelerate.
“We have administered 10 million doses in fourteen countries so far and now we will make at least another 10 million next week and make a larger scale from there,” said Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance. told CNN. “So, yes, there are not enough doses and they are not as fast as we would like. It took us 83 days from the first blow in the UK to the first blow in Africa, but now we are off to try to get as much of this out as we can. ”
COVAX, led by a coalition that includes Gavi and the World Health Organization, uses donations from governments and multilateral institutions to buy vaccines for poorer countries that cannot afford contracts with major drug companies.
The program has secured vaccines from AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech and the Serum Institute of India, in hopes of additional doses from companies currently working to obtain regulatory approvals. But getting enough supplies was difficult, in part because richer countries ordered more than they needed.
“The initial challenge was that, in the beginning, big orders were implemented that blocked a lot of doses,” Berkley said.
“It is estimated that there are about 800 million more doses bought by countries than they need depending on their population and another 1.4 billion options. So we hope that some of these will either be donated or will make their place in so we can make sure we make the vaccines available to everyone else. ”
Another obstacle to the rapid delivery of vaccines to poorer countries may be the reluctance of drug manufacturers to waive some intellectual property rights over the vaccines they have created.
“Now is the time to use all tools to expand production, including licensing and technology transfer and, where necessary, waivers of intellectual property,” WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a UN briefing on coronavirus last week.
“When the temporary waiver of intellectual property arises, we see a lack of cooperation and even serious resistance. To be honest, I can’t understand this, because this pandemic is unprecedented. The virus has taken the world hostage.”
Despite the delays, COVAX aims to make the distribution of the vaccine as fair as possible. Out of more than 180 countries in the program, 92 qualify for free or reduced vaccinations.