Rich countries have received more vaccines in recent weeks than Africa in all of 2021

The European Union, the United States and the United Kingdom have received more covid-19 vaccines in the last six weeks than Africa as a whole throughout the year, according to an alliance of NGOs that fears that, at the current rate, the first dose will not have reached the entire African population until April 2023.

Specific, Between November 11 and December 21, the EU, the United Kingdom and the United States received 513 million doses of vaccines, while the global data of Africa throughout 2021 round the 500 million. Only the 8,6 % of citizenship African has the full agenda vaccination, while the countries of the G7 will accumulate a excess of 1.4 billion doses until March 2022.

The NGO People’s Vaccine alliance has warned in a statement of the danger of “condemning the world to an endless cycle of variants, reinforcements, restrictions and even confinements” if vaccines do not reach all parts of the planet in an equitable way. The director of health policies of Oxfam and of the aforementioned alliance, Anna Marriot, has indicated that “By blocking real solutions for access to vaccines in the poorest countries”, the rich countries “are prolonging the pandemic and all the suffering that this entails”.

A vision also shared by the director of Global Justice Now, Nick Dearden: “If we want to have a normal Christmas again, we need to vaccinate everyone.” To do this, the People’s Vaccine alliance advocates exemption from intellectual property regulations for vaccines, tests and treatments.

A spokeswoman for the African Alliance for Vaccine Delivery, Maaza Seyoum, has lamented that, until now, “the leaders of the global north have opted for the obscene profits of pharmaceutical companies over the lives of the people of Africa.” However, he added, the omicron variant, detected for the first time in South Africa, “shows that inequality in vaccines is a threat to everyone and everywhere.”