In the race to vaccinate the world against Covid-19, developing countries are running dangerously behind, as mutations in the virus make it harder to reach – a situation that could mean at least another year of humanitarian and economic misery for poor nations.
The United States has already administered doses of vaccine to about 12% of its population, while Europe has reached about 5%. But in South America, only 1.8% of the population had received a vaccine until this week, while Asia reached 1.5% and Africa 0.1%, according to Our World in Data, a project based on the University from Oxford.
Almost 130 countries have not yet administered a single dose, the World Health Organization said recently. Only two countries in Sub-Saharan Africa – Seychelles and Mauritius – have started vaccinating a substantial proportion of frontline workers, although others are expected to launch vaccines in the coming days. .
The critically short supply of vaccines to the poorest nations risks being further reduced by the emergence of new variants of the virus, including in South Africa and Brazil, which appear to make some of the vaccines that have been guaranteed less effective. Large parts of Africa and some countries in Latin America and Asia are unlikely to cover most of their populations before 2023 or 2024, experts say.
All of which means it can take years for life to return to normal in the poorest countries, which saw more than 100 million people fall into extreme poverty last year and who lack the resources to release government spending as much as rich countries do. . Some emerging countries that managed to mount a domestic stimulus last year are running out of resources to continue.