Ghana receives the first Covid-19 vaccines from the global Covax initiative

Ghana has just received its first doses of Covid-19 vaccine from Covax, the global initiative created to help ensure that all countries have access to the vaccine.

A total of 600,000 doses of Oxford / AstraZeneca The vaccine arrived in Ghana’s capital Accra on Wednesday. It is the official start of a long worldwide immunization campaign.

Ghana is the first country to receive these vaccines. It will begin its rollout next week, starting with frontline healthcare professionals, the elderly and people with underlying diseases. The 600,000 doses, however, will cover only a fraction of Ghana’s approximately 30 million inhabitants.

Ivory Coast will be the next to receive doses of the Covax vaccine. But immunization campaigns in Africa are just beginning, after millions and millions of vaccines have been administered in wealthier countries.

Covax, which is led by the World Health Organization, GAVI, Vaccine Alliance and Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, was designed to ensure equitable access to the vaccine for all countries, regardless of wealth. At the moment, the initiative aims to deliver 2 billion doses of vaccines by the end of 2021, most of which will go to 92 of the world’s poorest countries.

But the initiative has been slow to be implemented, especially as it fights the richest countries for doses of vaccine.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, said this week that more than 210 million doses of vaccines have been distributed in just two countries, while more than 200 countries have not yet started giving their first doses.

Rich countries – with more than 14% of the world’s population – have purchased more than 53% of the vaccines most likely to be successful through pre-purchase agreements. At the moment, demand for vaccines exceeds supply, so even these wealthier countries are unable to inject weapons quickly enough. But they will probably be able to do this in a matter of months – in the summer, in the United States, for example – compared to some of the poorest countries in the world, where it can take years.

Many countries in Africa have not experienced the dramatic peaks of Covid-19 seen in other parts of the world. But a year after the start of the pandemic, some of the continent’s 54 countries are facing an increase in the number of cases, fueled by new variants, including a discovery in South Africa. This week, the entire African continent reached 100,000 deaths from Covid- 19 known.

Despite this, only a handful of African countries have started vaccinating. According to the African Union, a total of 1.5 billion doses of vaccine will be needed to inoculate 60 percent of the continent’s population of more than 1 billion. Although the African Union and countries are trying to strike deals – including Russia and China – many countries will need Covax’s help.

The United States recently committed a major $ 4 billion boost to Covax to help finance and distribute vaccines. But if wealthy countries continue to accumulate vaccine supplies, the pace of vaccination in the world’s least-wealthy countries will still be slow.

In addition to funding, global vaccination efforts need only more vaccine supplies, along with efforts to increase manufacturing and production capacity in low-income countries and to push pharmaceutical companies to potentially waive intellectual property rights to better share knowledge and technology.

Vaccinating the entire world will require a huge effort. It is not just a moral imperative to ensure that the entire world population has access to protective vaccines; it is a public health need. The coronavirus spreading in one corner of the world will remain a threat to everyone else, especially as new variants emerge.