Cape Town – Over 10 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been administered globally since the rollout first began in December 2020.
The rollout has reached 4.8 billion people which represents 62.7% of the world’s population, however, on the African continent only 16% of people have received one dose of the vaccine, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
While the majority of countries globally have vaccinated between 60-90% of its populations, there are only a handful of countries on the African continent that have vaccinated over 40% of its population.
According to Our World in Data, some of the most vaccinated African countries include South Africa with 46% of its adult population, Botswana with 49%, Egypt with 36% and Morocco with 66%.
Countries that have vaccinated less than 10% of its population include Tanzania with 4%, Nigeria with 7%, Ethiopia with 8% and Chad with 1.5%.
The countries with the most vaccinated populations include the United Arab Emirates with 99%, Chile with 92%, Spain with 88% and Uruguay with 83%.
Speaking to Nature, Mosoka Fallah, founder of Refuge Place International, a public-health organisation in Liberia, said until Covid-19 vaccine inequality is corrected, the world will continue to see new variants.
“As an African, the real significance of reaching 10 billion vaccines administered is the extreme inequity that exists in vaccine distribution between the global north and global south,” she said.
Statistics from Johns Hopkins University revealed that over 378.5 million Covid-19 cases have been recorded globally since the start of the pandemic, with more than 5.67 million deaths.