Fauci: Vaccines protect against hospitalizations 0:45
Nairobi, Keny
to (CNN) -
Every time I see a call from home, my heart sinks.
I am always afraid that they will call me to say that my grandmother has died.
She has been on a respirator for four weeks and my anxiety is near breaking point.
The dreaded call could come at any time: covid-19.
Again.
Even at 96, my Kenyan grandmother was among the hundreds of millions in the developing world who were not vaccinated until recently because wealthy nations have hoarded most of the vaccines available.
Although I am more than 60 years younger than her, in April I was fully vaccinated because I lived in the United States, where anyone over 12 years of age can get vaccinated if they want.
The acute shortage of doses for the world's poorest people has been dubbed "
vaccine
apartheid
," "greed," and a "catastrophic moral failure."
Yet public embarrassment has made little real difference, and Africa has received the fewest vaccines in the world so far.
About half of all Americans are now fully vaccinated. Here in Kenya, that figure is just 1.1% of the population. While rich countries are removing all restrictions and reopening their societies because most adults are fully inoculated, new cases are increasing at the fastest rate in Africa, where very few people are vaccinated.
The West has stockpiled more vaccines than it will need, with agreements negotiated by several countries that allow them to buy enough doses to vaccinate each of their citizens multiple times. At the beginning of the year, North American countries had purchased enough doses to fully vaccinate the region's population more than twice, while African countries had only obtained enough doses to cover a third of the continent's population. The youngest nation in the world, South Sudan, has run completely without vaccines and has closed its program because it does not know when it will receive more vaccines.
Of the 3.5 billion people already vaccinated worldwide, only 1.6% are in African countries.
New cases have been increasing for eight consecutive weeks on the continent, prompting a new wave of lockdowns, overwhelmed health systems, lost livelihoods and, worst of all, huge death toll.
In the last week alone, deaths increased more than 40%.
Many of these could have been avoided if more Africans had been vaccinated.
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Unable to mourn
Last month, I had just finished filming in a crowded ICU treating critically ill covid-19 patients in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, when I learned that my uncle Justus had died from the virus across the border in Kenya. .
He was heartbroken and angry.
He was not vaccinated because Kenya did not have, and still does not have enough vaccinations, even for an older person like him.
Justus was buried within 48 hours, as required by the Government of Kenya.
He was the third family member to have died in the pandemic that I did not have the opportunity to properly mourn or see buried.
In western Kenya, where my grandmother lives and where my uncle died, they are in conditions similar to those of a state of emergency as the delta variant spreads through the region.
This is yet another blow to an impoverished region in a country that has lived with a nationwide curfew since the end of March 2020.
As in all parts of the world, pandemic fatigue is sweeping Africa.
The difference here is that people cannot afford to ignore common sense public health measures, because we cannot afford a widespread deployment of vaccines and herd immunity to protect ourselves.
"And because people die every day, that's why I say that a delayed vaccine is a denied vaccine," Dr. Gitahi Githinji, CEO of the Amref Health Africa group, told CNN.
Africans perplexed by reluctance in the West
People wait for buses at a station in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda.
Rwanda has probably the strictest physical distancing and mask-wearing regulations I've seen anywhere on the continent;
However, the East African nation has been forced into another strict lockdown to try to mitigate the force of a fierce third wave of infections.
The country followed all the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) and seemed to do everything right, but it was still invaded by cases of coronavirus, because only vaccines provide true protection.
With only about 2% of Rwandans vaccinated, this may not be the last lockdown in the country.
Many people I have met in the five African countries I have visited in recent weeks are puzzled by the resistance to vaccination in the West. I saw coverage of protests in Europe against vaccination rules with a friend in Nairobi. "Can you give us those vaccines that you don't want?" He asked.
Some Americans are even bribed with beer, donuts or cash to receive doses of the COVID-19 vaccine when many Africans would happily take them for free if they were available.
While the world's richest seem to be entering a post-pandemic life, the rest of us in the southern hemisphere are still in the midst of a devastating crisis with no way out for the foreseeable future.
The highly communicable delta variant has now been detected in 21 African countries and continues to increase.
If you are not vaccinated against covid-19, you should not go to a bar or restaurant, says an expert
World health authorities have warned that during a global pandemic no one is safe until everyone is safe.
However, inequity in vaccines means that new virus strains could emerge in Africa and spread rapidly to the rest of the world, rendering any mass vaccination gains elsewhere ineffective.
An abandoned continent
The biggest lesson for Africa, say some leaders here, is that it is alone, and there is no global solidarity when people are at their most vulnerable.
"As a continent, we must stop believing that there is someone who is a Biblical Good Samaritan who is about to come to help us," Kenyan Health Minister Mutahi Kagwe told me in May.
"This is a situation in which we have seen very clearly that it is whoever can save himself and God save us."
Countries like Kenya depend on Covax, an effort by the WHO to provide covid-19 vaccines at a subsidized cost to low- and middle-income countries, but it is underfunded and the need is far greater than the small drip of doses that are available for distribution.
The United States could have an excess of 300 million vaccines against covid-19 by the end of July, according to a report
Long after the richest parts of the world have won the war against the pandemic, Africa could be the last place in the world still fighting a fierce virus without weapons or ammunition. The often-repeated mantra that "we're in this together" rings hollow when a privileged few have more vaccines than they need and many have nothing.
By the time local officials vaccinated my grandmother, it was too late because she had been infected with coronavirus.
She survived her husband, my paternal grandfather, for over 25 years;
however, we are now reaching an agreement that he may not survive this disease.
All I needed to protect myself was to walk to a nearby pharmacy in Washington.
But many people, like my grandmother, have died, or will die, from the accident where they live.
His heart is now failing and mine is breaking.
Covid-19
