South African President Cyril Ramaphosa addresses the crowd gathered at Miki Yili Stadium ahead of the 25th anniversary of Freedom Day in Makhanda, Eastern Cape Province on April 27, 2019.
MICHELE SPATARI | AFP | Getty Images
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Tuesday urged the world’s richest countries to stop “hoarding” vaccines and called for an end to “vaccine nationalism”.
In comments at the World Economic Forum’s virtual Davos Agenda event, Ramaphosa warned that some countries had ordered more vaccines than they needed, and that this was counterproductive to the global recovery efforts.
“To end the pandemic globally, more cooperation is needed in the rollout of vaccines, so that no country is left behind in this effort,” he said.
“The rich countries of the world have gone out and bought large doses of vaccines from the developers and manufacturers of these vaccines, and some countries have gone even further and obtained up to four times as much as their population needs,” he said.
“That was to stockpile these vaccines and now it is being done to the exclusion of other countries in the world that need it most,” he added, urging major economies to free up their surplus stocks for distribution to developing countries.
South Africa is the country most affected by Covid-19 in the continent, which has largely managed to prevent the kind of uncontrolled spread that has brought the US and much of Europe to a halt. As of Tuesday morning, the country had registered more than 1.4 million cases with 41,117 deaths.
In a panel discussion as part of the Davos Agenda event on Tuesday morning, Africa CDC director John Nkengasong said the continent is facing a “very aggressive second wave” of the pandemic, with the death rate increasing an average of 18% in the last 55 African member states. week.
“We as a continent need to recognize that vaccines won’t be there when we want them, but as such we really need to focus on the public health measures that we know work,” he added.
Ramaphosa, who also chairs the African Union, praised the continent’s collaborations on Covid-19 responses, including the African Medical Supplies Platform, which has provided assistance to national health systems, established regional collaboration centers and has local health workers deployed to testing and treatment efforts.
He also praised the progress of the African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team, which he says was created when AU countries realized “how the richest countries in the world are behaving.”
The AVATT has provisionally secured 270 million doses directly for AU member states, on top of the 600 million expected from the World Health Organization’s COVAX initiative.