The United Kingdom provided the global community a leap of faith this week, rolling out the first mass vaccinations against Covid-19 in the western hemisphere. Amidst all the uncertainties, it is a remarkable achievement for humanity.
The United States which has borne the brunt of the global case burden has approved the Pfizer vaccine, and gone ahead to reserve doses for its population. With other vaccine development efforts faltering, there is going to be pressure on Pfizer to produce enough doses to meet global demand.
That creates a natural pecking order. The bigger economic powers and countries with the bigger disease burden will take precedence.
There are countries in the world that simply cannot afford the vaccine and also lack the logistical infrastructure to efficiently rollout a vaccination campaign. Many of them are in Africa. Studies by international bodies show that only about a third of African countries could successfully rollout a Covid-19 vaccination campaign if the shots became available to them today.
Accounting for a fifth of the world population, Africa surprisingly has had the least number of Covid-19 cases for any region of the world. That makes it one of the places where early vaccination could yield the biggest dividends. In the world of cold calculations however, that again is what pushes it further down the merit order for delivery of the jabs.
Time should not be wasted lamenting Africa’s fate. Instead the interlude should be used to fix existing gaps. It is a rule of thumb that a vaccine will only offer protection if it covers the majority of the population. Experts talk of a need for at least two-thirds of the population to be inoculated for a vaccination programme to deliver demonstrable gains.