African governments will need to take urgent action to prepare for the distribution of coronavirus vaccines, the continent’s fitness control body said Thursday, after the African Union (AU) announced that it had earned 270 million doses.
“We can’t wait. It’s not a polio or measles vaccine. We want to do it quickly. Our economies are declining, our population is dying,” John Nkengasong, director of the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC Africa), said at a press conference.
“Surely there is no explanation as to why accelerated arrangements do not happen,” he added.
The AU announced Wednesday is aimed at countries that cannot fund their own vaccination campaigns.
Governments will participate in financing agreements through the African Export and Import Bank that can allow invoices over a five-year period.
Dosages: via Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Johnson
At least 50 million safe doses under the AU agreement are expected to be obtained from April to June.
But Nkengasong said member states should act temporarily to organize garage sites in major cities, exercise fitness workers, safe needle materials, and create effective systems to record who won the doses.
He said governments can start ordering vaccines on an AU platform in the coming days.
Africa recorded about 3. 1 million cases of Covid-19, or 3. 5% of the global total, and about 75,000 deaths, or 2. 4% of the global total, according to the knowledge of the African CDC.
But there has been an average weekly increase in instances of 18, consisting of pennies over the next month, with significant increases in southern and western Africa in particular.
About 30,000 new instances are recorded in Africa each day, compared with 18,000 recorded in the continent’s first wave last year, Nkengasong said.
The African CDC has set a target of vaccinating 60% of Covid-19 Africans in 2021 and 2022.