First Covax Covid-19 Vaccines From WHO Arrives in Ghana
The first shipment of free Covid-19 vaccines from the World Health Organization-backed Covax facility landed in Ghana Wednesday morning, marking the beginning of what is shaping up to be the biggest vaccination drive in history aimed at developing countries.
The delivery—consisting of 600,000 doses of a vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca PLC and produced by the Serum Institute of India—was greeted by senior Ghanaian government officials at Kotoka International Airport in the capital Accra. The doses will be enough to vaccinate some 300,000 healthcare and front-line workers in Ghana, a West African country of around 31 million people that is currently battling its second wave of infections.
Funded mostly by rich Western governments, including the U.S., and charitable foundations, the Covax facility aims to ship some 2 billion doses to developing countries this year, most of them for free. Its backers say that should be enough to inoculate around 20% of the population of the 92 poorest economies in the world and end what they call the acute phase of the coronavirus pandemic.
Western countries have been criticized for buying up large stocks of Covid-19 vaccines, often enough to immunize their populations multiple times over as they wait for different shots to pass clinical trials and be cleared by national regulators. Meanwhile, many developing countries—dozens of them in Africa—have yet to start administering any Covid-19 vaccines at all.
Over half of the more than 210 million doses administered globally were given in just two countries—the U.S. and China—and over 80% were in 10 mostly high-income nations, the WHO said this week. WHO Secretary-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Monday hit out at rich governments continuing to seal bilateral vaccine deals with manufacturers that he said were cutting into supplies already promised to Covax.
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SOURCE: https://www.wsj.com/articles
