NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – The African Union has secured about 300 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine in the largest such agreement ever made for Africa, a continental official said on Tuesday.
Nicaise Ndembi, a senior scientific adviser to the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Associated Press in an interview that the current AU president, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, is expected to announce the news on Wednesday.
The 300 million doses are being secured regardless of COVAX’s global effort to distribute COVID-19 vaccines to low-income countries, Ndembi said.
“We have reached the final stage of our business,” he said, referring to questions about who will provide the vaccines and at what cost for the next announcement.
The news comes when coronavirus infections increase again in parts of Africa, especially in South Africa, where a rapidly spreading coronavirus variant now constitutes the majority of new cases. The continent over the weekend has exceeded 3 million confirmed cases since the pandemic began, with more than 1.2 million in South Africa.
“We plan to have them by the end of the first quarter” of 2021, said Ndembi of the nearly 300 million doses, which will be allocated on the continental shelf that the AU created last year to facilitate access to the 54 African countries their purchasing power and buy pandemic supplies in bulk.
“We expect 600 million doses of the COVAX facility,” he said, but African authorities are still waiting for the details, so “we are happy to have alternative solutions.”
Ndembi said African officials have approached at least 10 vaccine manufacturers and developers, while the continent seeks to vaccinate 60% of its population of 1.3 billion people, or about 780 million people. The African CDC said that about 1.5 billion doses are needed for this, assuming two doses per person. He estimates that the effort will cost about $ 10 billion.
Ndembi said he was very optimistic that this could be achieved in two years. Africa’s CDC warned that taking much longer than that could risk the virus becoming endemic in parts of the African continent.
In a speech to South Africans on Monday night, Ramaphosa announced that the country had secured 20 million doses of vaccine “to be delivered mainly in the first half of the year.” He gave no further details, but said “we will make new announcements as we complete our negotiations with vaccine manufacturers”.
Africa struggled on several fronts to obtain supplies of vaccines. Ramaphosa said the African Vaccine Procurement Team recently created under the AU “did a tremendous job of ensuring vaccine doses” through what he called intensive engagement with manufacturers.
“The South African government has also been directly involved with several vaccine manufacturers for more than six months,” he said.
“Given the huge global demand for vaccines and the much greater purchasing power of the wealthiest countries, we are exploring every way to get the maximum doses of vaccine as quickly as possible,” said Ramaphosa.
___
Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at:
https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic
https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine
https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak