Good morning, this is Archie Bland buying Helen Sullivan’s live blog. (A groodle is what a goldendoodle is called in Australia, I just learned.)
First Ghana, where the World Health Organization’s global vaccine sharing scheme, Covax, applied its first Covid-19 vaccines on Wednesday, while the race to get the doses to the world’s poorest people and tame the pandemic is accelerating.
A flight with 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine produced by the Serum Institute of India landed in the capital Accra, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations International Children’s Fund (Unicef), in a joint statement.
The injections will be used to start a vaccination campaign that will prioritize frontline health workers and others at high risk, according to a plan presented by Ghanaian health officials on Friday.
“This is an important occasion, as the arrival of Covid-19 vaccines in Ghana is critical to ending the pandemic,” said Anne-Claire Dufay, from Unicef Ghana, and WHO representative in the country, Francis Kasolo, in a statement reported by Reuters.
“These 600,000 Covax vaccines are part of an initial portion of deliveries … which represent part of the first wave of Covid vaccines targeting several low and middle income countries,” they said.
The Ghana launch is a milestone for the initiative that is trying to bridge a politically sensitive gap between the millions of people being vaccinated in wealthier countries and the comparatively few who have received vaccines in less developed parts of the world.
Its goal is to deliver a total of 2.3 billion doses by the end of the year, including 1.8 billion to the poorest countries at no cost to their governments, and to cover up to 20% of the countries’ populations. But it will not be enough for nations to achieve collective immunity and effectively curb the spread of the virus.
On Tuesday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged wealthy nations to share doses of the vaccine with Covax, saying the goal of equitable distribution was “at risk”.
“So far 210 million doses of the vaccine have been administered globally, but half of them are in just two countries,” said Tedros in Geneva. “More than 200 countries have not yet administered a single dose.”