Majority of African nations won't meet vaccination goal this month

The majority of African nations will not meet the World Health Assembly’s goal of vaccinating 10% of populations for COVID-19 by the end of September. Only about 3% of the continent’s overall population — about 39 million people — have been fully vaccinated.

According to the World Health Organization, 42 out of 54 nations are expected to miss this target.

Many African countries have not been able to access vaccine doses as high-income countries hoard supplies, leading to what Dr. John Nkengasong, director at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, calls a “vaccine famine.”

Instead, many countries have entered third and fourth waves of the pandemic, stretching health systems to their limit, with an estimated 26 people from the African continent dying of COVID-19 every hour.

“Vaccine hoarding has held Africa back and we urgently need more vaccines, but as more doses arrive, African countries must zero in and drive forward precise plans to rapidly vaccinate the millions of people that still face a grave threat from COVID-19,” said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, in a press release.

Many countries across the continent had been largely dependent on COVAX, but it failed to deliver the doses it promised. The African continent was supposed to receive 320 million vaccines by August through the facility but has only received about 30 million, said Strive Masiyiwa, a special envoy for the African Union, during a press conference Thursday.

There has been an uptick in shipments of vaccines to African nations in recent months, as wealthy countries begin donating more doses after they’ve vaccinated large portions of their populations. About 21 million vaccines were shipped to the African continent through COVAX in August — equal to the combined supply for the preceding four months.

The AU, through the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust, has also started shipping Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses to countries that have purchased them. It delivered 6.4 million doses in August.

The AU announced on Thursday that a controversial deal to export doses partially produced in South Africa to Europe was halted. Doses that were already sent to Europe will be returned and distributed among AU member states. This is expected to increase the number of doses the AU can ship to countries each month. The AU had previously planned to ship 10 million J&J doses to countries in September but now plans to ship 20 million.

And while access to doses because of supply constraints has been the primary problem facing many African nations, there are also concerns around the speed at which some countries are vaccinating their populations after receiving doses. According to WHO, 26 countries have used less than half of the COVID-19 vaccines they’ve received.