Covid, WHO fails to vaccinate 40% of humanity

The World Health Organization (WHO) will fail to vaccinate 40% of the population in every country in the world against Covid-19 by the end of the year, with particularly serious delays in Africa. Half of the 194 WHO member countries will not reach the target in time and in about forty states the percentage of vaccinated against the disease caused by Sars-CoV-2 is less than 10% of the population. WHO blamed the vaccine hoarding, particularly by a handful of Western countries, which are already administering the third doses. Worldwide, 8.6 billion doses of Covid vaccines have been administered to date, but mostly in high-income countries that had the resources to secure contracts with the manufacturers. Dozens of other countries are dependent on supplies from Covax, the UN-backed vaccine-sharing program that aims to vaccinate the population of low-income countries. Rich countries are criticized for not doing enough to support vaccine equity globally through Covax. However, shipments of vaccines under the program have increased in recent weeks. By the last week of December, Covax will have delivered 722 million doses. The data, however, provide a merciless picture: for the WHO, while 171 doses of vaccine per 100 inhabitants were administered in Germany, only 2.7 per 100 inhabitants were injected in Madagascar and 0.32 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In most African countries, the number of doses per 100 population is double-digit, but at the low end. The pharmaceutical industry is convinced that the imbalance is not due to lack of doses. According to the association of pharmaceutical companies Ifpma, about 1.4 billion vaccines were produced in December alone. Rather, he argues, vaccine skepticism is high in many countries and several states have problems distributing vaccines. WHO replies that countries would be ready if they received their doses in an organized and timely manner. Many rich countries have collectively pledged over 1 billion doses, as donations. However, according to WHO, deliveries often take a long time to materialize. Some doses have an expiration date within a few weeks, which makes distribution in poorer countries particularly complicated.