With the slow spread of COVID-19 vaccines in the United States, some estimates suggest that billions of people worldwide will not receive a vaccine for COVID-19 until 2022 or 2023.
Bloomberg has published a map showing the level of vaccine circulation in different countries and almost the entire continent of Africa – more than 50 countries – is empty.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and former president of Liberia, says much of Africa could be left out until next year.
Sirleaf recalls the Ebola uprising, which struck her country, among others, in West Africa in 2015. Last year, she was asked to co-chair the re- review of the global response to the coronavirus pandemic. And, in an interview with NPR’s Morning Editing, she says Africa is in danger of being abandoned.
“In Africa, we don’t have the facilities. It’s as simple as that,” Sirleaf says. “Unless vaccines are seen as a free good on the ground so that everyone is safe. , no one is safe – when it is seen in that context, then perhaps the richest countries in the world come up with a formula that says, how can we share the vaccine with the those countries that don’t have enough resources? “
Main points of interview
Vaccines are at this rate, on this unique scale. And even the United States has found supply problems. It is very difficult to get millions of doses to millions of people in a very short time. Are there even greater challenges in parts of Africa?
We will face some daunting challenges, no doubt. But I would like to point out the case of Ebola. When Africa set up a platform to ensure that the drugs and responses to Ebola were available with the support of African countries, this platform was used to ensure a balanced circulation among these African countries in feum. In fact, countries were limited at that time because Ebola affected all three neighboring countries in West Africa. So the distribution was probably easier because our population in these countries is much smaller than others. It would be more complicated if you have all the African countries.
We should remember that Ebola was a real pressure on the associations of several countries. What are some of the ways you learned to deal with public anxiety and to get real medical care for people?
Well, the first thing you need [is] to obtain accurate, reliable information about the state of the disease so that citizens are properly informed. To avoid the need to measure, they do not need to measure the impact of the disease. And one has to have coordination. You may not have different organizations involved in the health sector or involved in the finance sector. That’s the only way you can earn the confidence of citizens to ensure that, even if you have a way of dealing with it, they take the medication or adhere to the protocol, no matter the is it a mask or is it a social distance. And of course, in the case of Ebola, again, strong partnerships because there, too, the three affected countries did not have the resources to get the medicine and to get the kind of support that was necessary. But they had good partners.
In the USA, there are many people who have expressed doubts about mask making and social distance. They refused to take part. And there is also widespread suspicion about vaccines. Do you know all that?
Yes, it does. I mean, Liberia faced the same thing in the early days of Ebola, but we were able to overcome it through strong government action. And leaders need to be able to articulate this, the severity of this disease in their lives and livelihoods in very clear terms with very clear action and a strong commitment not only to design these measures, but to find a way to ensure that their citizens understand and are willing to surrender for their own safety.
Were you surprised that this virus got out of control in a way that Ebola did not?
Yes, because he did not take the steps to deal with the virus. I have to say that, with regard to Ebola, I said first that we are facing the same problem – the problem of confidence of people who thought that this was, you know, someone who trying to limit mobility, their rights to freedom. These are the kinds of concerns that citizens have. But it is up to leaders to address these fears and anxieties and make sure they are overcome.
