Compared to other regions, Africa was slow to start and is likely to be slow to catch up, health officials said.
Emerging markets like South Africa have also found that they pay more than their wealthier peers.
Double paying
“There is a global demand for the vaccine in the first quarter. We are not aware of a cheaper option that is immediately available,” said the Ministry of Health ‘s head of communications, Popo Maja.
The SII did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
But few cheap vaccination options are available to African countries because of continued global demand, leaving the continent’s slump behind, government officials and health agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) say.
Making their own contracts
Most African countries suffered fewer deaths from the first wave of the virus last year compared to other parts of the world, but case numbers are now rising across the continent, especially in the southern region.
“If we do not manage the situation we will end up with a moral catastrophe in our hands,” the head of the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, John Nkengasong, told CNN last week. “If we have these vaccines and continue to aggressively implement public health measures, the issue of variables would disappear.”
Last year, WHO established the Covid-19 Engine Access Accelerator (ACT), partnership to coordinate production and increase access to medications, vaccines and trials.
COVAX, the vaccine arm of ACT Accelerator, aims to roll out 2 billion doses of Covid-19 worldwide by the end of this year, with a forecast of 690 million for low-income African countries.
The campaign is led by WHO; Consortium for Epidemic Preparation Innovations; and Gavi, Vaccination Federation. It is funded by development agencies and grants from organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
If Gavi ‘s supply forecast is correct, countries will only have enough to vaccinate 27% of their total population, James Fulker, a spokesman for Gavi, told CNN.
WHO urges richer countries to prioritize equitable supply rather than entering into broad contracts on their own with pharmaceutical or other companies to split the unused doses of COVAX.
At the same time, the health agency is encouraging poor countries to get more coverage through their own contracts.
The AU has also been instrumental in finding contracts for the member countries, with the establishment of the African Vaccine Acquisition Action Team (AVATT).
Last week, AVATT received 400 million doses from the SII, adding to the 270 million received in January, Nkengasong said.
Anger against vaccine nationalism
The global divergence in access to Covid-19 vaccines has caused widespread anger among African leaders, including South African president and AU chairman Cyril Ramaphosa, who warned at a landmark meeting The Economic Forum last week said that richer countries are “vaccinating” vaccines, and urged global action to ensure their fair distribution.
“We are concerned about the nationality of vaccines,” Ramaphosa said. “The rich countries of the world have gone out and received large doses of vaccines from the developers and manufacturers of these vaccines and some countries have even gone longer and have up to four times what their population needs. ”
This behavior margins the countries that are “most in need” of the vaccine, Ramaphosa said.
The WHO has repeated the words of Ramaphosa several times, saying recently that the vaccine gap between rich and poor countries is widening.
National rollout
But countries in sub-Saharan Africa are working with as much as they can to start some broadcasting.
Value divided
“It is in their best interest, in the common interest that people get the vaccine in good time so that we can get rid of this pandemic as a group,” Nkengasong told CNN. a way that only parts of the world like the richest countries can get out of here without the southern hemisphere getting out of the pandemic. ”
In his opening remarks at the 148th session of the WHO governing board on January 18, its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyses, said that the approach of the first world nations was “self-defensive.”
Ghebreyses wants the vaccination to go ahead in all countries within the first 100 days of 2021, but this could be an ambitious target when there are not many countries. Africans have yet to be vaccinated and may not be for some weeks.
“Time is short, and the stakes couldn’t be higher; every minute counts,” he said.
CNN’s Brent Swails, Stephanie Busari and Krystina Shveda contributed to this report.