By Maggie Fick
NAIROBI (Reuters) – Many African countries are facing logistical problems to accelerate their immunization campaigns against Covid-19 as the arrival of vaccines on the continent finally increases, the head of the African disease control agency said on Thursday. fair.
Only 6.6% of Africa’s 1.2 billion people are fully vaccinated, John Nkengasong, head of the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC Africa), said at a virtual press conference.
That means Africa is far from meeting the African Union’s goal of fully vaccinating 70% of people by the end of 2022, he said.
“What we’re seeing now is a lot more vaccines arriving and receipt being challenged because of logistics and delivery,” said Nkengasong. “It’s not necessarily about hesitation, but about transporting vaccines from the airport to (people’s) arms, it’s about logistics.”
Africa’s slow uptake of vaccines is also affecting the health sector, where only one in four workers has been fully vaccinated, the World Health Organization’s Africa office said.
“Unless our doctors, nurses and other frontline staff are given full protection, we risk a setback in efforts to contain this disease,” said Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, at a separate briefing.
Nkengasong said the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon face specific logistical challenges.
Congo administered about 168,000 doses of vaccines against Covid-19, according to a Reuters monitoring, enough to fully vaccinate 0.1% of the population.
In April, authorities reallocated to other African countries most of the 1.7 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine that Congo had received a month earlier by the Covax consortium because they were about to expire.
(Additional reporting by Duncan Miriri)
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