The WHO expressed its concern in a statement last night.
As new infections increase "
week on week
," nearly 90% of African countries will not meet the global goal of vaccinating one-tenth of their population by September.
At least 225 million doses of vaccine are urgently needed for the majority of countries to meet this deadline.
But where is vaccination on the African continent? Africa accounts for about 1% of the more than 2.1 billion doses administered worldwide. Only 9.4 million Africans are fully immunized, and only 2% of the continent's 1.3 billion people have received a dose. Far from the 12% of the world's population. Vaccination dynamics are also much weaker than the global average, and further behind that of OECD countries.
This low vaccination rate hides great disparities. A few island states such as the Seychelles or the Republic of Mauritius have achieved vaccination rates of 71% and 20% respectively. On the continent, other countries are far ahead like Morocco. With almost 2 million doses administered, the country has vaccinated nearly 25% of its population. Then come Equatorial Guinea, then Tunisia and Algeria, according to the latest figures available, with 11%, 7% and 6% of their population having received a first injection.
Conversely, some countries such as The Gambia, Gabon and South Sudan are very late with only 41,000, 34,000 and 12,000 doses administered, according to the counts carried out by Johns-Hopkins University since the start of the pandemic. Other countries, such as Chad, have just launched their vaccination campaign and therefore do not yet have accessible data.
According to the WHO, Africa is under the imminent threat of a 3rd wave. The pandemic is on the rise, particularly in ten African countries, four of which have recorded a 30% jump from one week to the next, such as South Africa. According to the South African National Institute of Communicable Diseases, more than 9,000 new infections have been identified in the past 24 hours. The country now has more than 1.7 million cases for 57,410 deaths, 100 of which occurred in the last 24 hours. Along with Egypt, Tunisia, Uganda and Zambia, the country accounts for nearly three quarters of new cases recorded across Africa.
Vaccination is therefore becoming more than necessary, and even if the figures are still very low, the African Union Crisis Agency has raised its vaccination targets at the end of 2021 from 20 to 40%. Emmanuel Macron has meanwhile posted an ambition of 60% vaccination in Africa at the end of the first quarter of 2022. The G7 announced through the voice of the British government wanting to provide a billion doses of vaccines to poor countries. The United States has pledged to provide half of it, or 500 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech.