SOUTH Africa has secured enough COVID-19 vaccines for at least 26 million people, Health Minister Zweli Mkhize disclosed yesterday.
Africa’s most industrialised economy aims to vaccinate 40 million people, or two-thirds of its population, to reach herd immunity.
It has recorded the most coronavirus infections and deaths on the African continent and received its first shots of the AstraZeneca vaccine from India this week.
A health ministry presentation said the government had signed a term sheet for 9 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine at $10 a dose.
One of the conditions for J&J’s vaccine was the establishment of a no-fault compensation system for adverse events, it said.
The presentation added that Moderna had offered the country 200,000 doses of its COVID-19 vaccine priced at $30-$42 a dose in the second quarter, with more doses available in the third quarter.
Source - The African Mirror
ZIMBABWE will receive 200,000 free doses of China’s Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine, President Emmerson Mnangagwa said yesterday, after China and Russia offered shots against the coronavirus to the impoverished southern African nation.
Mnangagwa, in a nationally televised address, also said there were plans to vaccinate at least 60% of the population using government and private sector funding.
The coronavirus pandemic has increased rapidly in Zimbabwe over the past few weeks, with about 70% of its known 33,964 infections and more than two-thirds of the 1,269 deaths recorded since the beginning of January.
The Sinopharm vaccine is approved in China for general public use and is also being administered in a number of other countries. “This kind gesture attests to the fact that China is indeed a true friend of Zimbabwe,” Mnangagwa said.
China is a major investor in Zimbabwe especially in diamond mining and the energy sector, where it is building power stations and is providing loans after Western lenders pulled out following more than two decades of Zimbabwean arrears.
Chinese Ambassador Guo Shaochun said on Tuesday Zimbabwe was one of the first 14 countries to receive vaccine aid from Beijing.
Mnangagwa said his government had finalised a vaccine deployment strategy that would see at least 9 million people – 60% of the population – being inoculated.
“The first phase of inoculation will see frontline workers, the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions being prioritised,” he said, giving no further detail.
A finance ministry official said last week Zimbabwe had set aside $100 million to procure COVID-19 vaccines.
SIXTEEN African countries have shown interest in securing COVID-19 vaccines under an African Union (AU) plan, and allocations could be announced in the next three weeks, the head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said yesterday.
While many rich nations have already begun mass vaccination drives, only a few African countries have started vaccination, and the 55-member African Union hopes to see 60% of the continent’s 1.3 billion people immunised in the next three years.
The AU has so far secured around 670 million doses for its member states.
Africa CDC Director John Nkengasong said the 16 countries had asked for a total of a total 114 million doses under the AU’s Vaccine Acquisition Task Team (AVATT), which began work in mid-January.
“Our hope is that in the next two to three weeks, they should be having their vaccines,” he told a virtual news conference.
Africa is also due to receive about 600 million vaccine doses this year via the COVAX facility, co-led by the World Health Organization.
At a later briefing, WHO Africa director Matshidiso Moeti said nearly 90 million doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine could start arriving on the continent later this month.
“These doses would help countries reach 3% of their populations in the first half of 2021, targeting the most at-risk groups, especially front-line health workers,” she said.
Moeti said some 320,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had been allocated to Cabo Verde, Rwanda, South Africa and Tunisia, and deliveries were expected this month.
The COVAX facility aims to help secure vaccines for 20% of Africans, which will mean about 600 million doses, Moeti said.
Africa has so far reported 3.5 million coronavirus infections and 88,000 deaths, according to a Reuters tally.
GHANA plans to procure 17.6 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine by the end of June with the first doses arriving in March, President Nana Akufo-Addo said on Sunday.
Like other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Ghana is battling a second wave of the novel coronavirus. Its daily infection rate is rising and is close to record levels, data compiled by Reuters shows. So far it has recorded over 63,000 cases and 416 deaths.
“Our aim is to vaccinate the entire population, with an initial target of twenty million people,” Akufo-Addo said in a speech to the West African nation of around 30 million.
He did not say which vaccines they planned to acquire.
As richer nations race ahead with mass immunisation campaigns, Africa is scrambling to obtain supplies for its 1.3 billion people. Only a handful of African nations have begun giving doses.