Current Events > The world is making billions of Covid vaccines. Why is Africa not getting them?

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/16/world-billions-covid-vaccine-doses-africa-unprotected

In a shocking symbol of the wests failure to honour its promise of equitable vaccine distribution, millions of Covid vaccines manufactured in Africa that should have saved the lives of Africans have been shipped to Europe in recent weeks. Indeed I have learned from African leaders that, this month and next, about 10m single-shot Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccines filled and finished at the Aspen factory in South Africa will be exported to Europe, at the very time that Africa is grappling with its deadliest wave of Covid-19 infections yet. Compared with the swift development of the pathbreaking Covid vaccines, getting shots into all the worlds arms should be straightforward. But vaccine nationalism and Europes neocolonial approach to global health is dividing the world into rich and protected people, who live, and those who are poor, unprotected and at risk of dying. Of the 4.7bn vaccines that have been distributed globally, more than 80% have gone to the richest G20 countries. The gap between rich and poor is now so wide that, while high-income countries have administered almost 100 doses for every 100 citizens, low-income countries have administered only 1.5 doses per 100.

To date, 496m vaccines have been administered across the European Union, which has a population of roughly 440 million people. Only 77.3m doses have been administered across Africas population,which is almost three times as large, at 1.3 billion people. And so, while 50% of European, US and UK adult populations have now been fully vaccinated, the figure for Africa is 1.8%, well behind India, which has only vaccinated 8% of its population. Due to the sluggish delivery of vaccines, the World Health Organization (WHO) now predicts that 47 of Africas 54 countries will miss even the very modest September target of vaccinating 10% of their citizens. In countries like Burundi, not a single vaccine has yet been administered. At these current rates there is no hope of Africa achieving the wests vaccination levels this year or next. Unsurprisingly, African leaders speak of vaccine apartheid. While governments across the west get ready to administer booster vaccines, millions of Africas nurses and health workers, risking their lives to save others, will go wholly unprotected. So will Africas vulnerable elderly population. The vaccine programme should have been a new kind of arms race. In quick succession, country after country should have been able to inject its citizens. Instead, the countries with the most vaccines are failing to help those with the least, and now the damaging economic effects on jobs and livelihoods are causing a growing divergence between the fate of poor and rich countries. Low vaccination rates across the continent have led the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to mark down African economic prospects yet again, while upping those of the vaccinated west, and Africa is suffering growth rates that are half those of the rest of the world.

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Give you three guesses.

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the US hoards them but their people wont take them so they expire

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Biden says it's more important to give booster shots to Americans.

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The shot's aren't free. Canada is paying for Canada's, France is paying for France's, Russia is paying for Russia's, Egypt is paying for Egypt's (you don't even have to be Egyptian) and somehow the US is paying for the US's.

Maybe Nambia needs to pay for Nambia's? South Africa apparently appropriated a whole bunch, so good luck keeping that factory.

A lot of the Presidents and people dont want them and opt for their own treatment and therapies. Many of them are tired of Western drugs and experimentations and would rather care for their own people themselves. I don't blame them

OdafeOweh posted...

Egypt is Africa

Thus, there's no worldwide conspiracy to keep the doses away from Africa.

Malfurion posted...

Biden says it's more important to give booster shots to Americans.

Which is unfortunate since Africa could be where the next variant comes from.

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