By Camillus Eboh and Omar Mohammed
ABUJA / NAIROBI (Reuters) – Nigeria, Kenya and Rwanda started vaccinating frontline health workers and vulnerable citizens against COVID-19 on Friday, when Africa, the world’s poorest continent and home to 1 , 3 billion people, intensified their vaccination campaigns.
While some wealthy western nations have already inoculated millions of people, many African countries have struggled to secure doses and have yet to give a single injection.
But the global COVAX vaccine-sharing facility, co-led by the World Health Organization (WHO), the GAVI vaccine alliance and others, has begun to bear fruit in nations from Ghana to Rwanda.
“It means that I will die when God wants, because the coronavirus cannot kill me now,” said Stephanie Nyirankuriza, 90, leaning on a cane after being shot at a health center east of Kigali, the capital of Rwanda.
Rwanda is the first nation in Africa to use doses from the pharmaceutical company Pfizer that require deep-frozen storage.
President Paul Kagame’s government, which prides itself on its technological prowess, but is often criticized as authoritarian, installed a special infrastructure to keep the Pfizer vaccine at the required -70ºC.
The Kagame government, which received injections from Pfizer and AstraZeneca through COVAX facilities, plans to vaccinate up to 30% of Rwanda’s 12 million people by the end of the year.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and its largest economy, inoculated healthcare professionals with AstraZeneca vaccines on Friday, the start of a campaign aimed at vaccinating 80 million of the 200 million population this year.
“I want everyone to be vaccinated,” Ngong Cyprian, a 42-year-old doctor, told Reuters in the capital Abuja when he became the first in Nigeria to receive his injection, while officials applauded and applauded.
President Muhammadu Buhari will be vaccinated on Saturday in an effort to boost public confidence in vaccines.
Nigeria received 3.92 million doses of AstraZeneca on Tuesday under COVAX, but the facility aims to cover only 20% of the population in the countries it helps. Nigeria also expects at least 40 million doses from the African Union, as well as 100,000 donated doses of India’s Covishield vaccine.
‘THE VACCINE IS SAFE’
Applause hailed the first vaccines in Kenya on Friday, after receiving its first million doses this week via COVAX.
“I’m feeling great,” said Patrick Amoth, director general of the Ministry of Health, after receiving his injection. “The vaccine is safe.”
Kenya, which wants to revive its tourism-dependent economy, the largest in East Africa, plans to vaccinate 1.25 million people by June and another 9.6 million in the next phase, with more vaccines expected within weeks.
“This could mark the beginning of the end of the pandemic,” said Susan Mochache, a senior official in the ministry of health.
Neighboring Uganda on Friday received its first batch of 864,000 doses of AstraZeneca via COVAX and plans to begin inoculations on March 10.
As of Thursday, Africa as a whole had reported nearly 4 million infections and 104,000 deaths – still a relatively small number compared to other continents, with higher national mortality counts in the United States, India, Brazil, Russia and Great Britain -Brittany.
South Africa has recorded by far the highest number of COVID-19 infections and deaths on the African continent, with 1.5 million cases and more than 50,000 deaths to date.
On Friday, a senior health official said that South Africa was negotiating with an African Union (AU) platform to buy vaccines for at least 10 million of its inhabitants.
The country has provisionally received 12 million doses developed by AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson in an AU vaccine plan, but it was unclear how many vaccines he would try to buy after he suspended plans to use the AstraZeneca vaccine. ($ 1 = 109,5500 Kenyan shillings)
(Additional reporting by Clement Uwiringiyimana in Kigali, Elias Biryabirema in Kampala and Alexander Winning in Johannesburg; Writing by Gareth Jones; Editing by Alex Richardson)