Last week, it was revealed that Israel has successfully administered the COVID-19 vaccine to about 21 percent of its total population. While the impressiveness of that figure can be somewhat diminished by pointing out that this comes to “just” 1.9 million people in total, it is nevertheless nothing short of a logistical feat and a success of leadership that gets 2 million doses of the world’s most in-demand vaccine administered in just over 3 weeks.
Israel’s contemporaries are not far behind. Also last week, the UAE revealed that it vaccinated 138,154 residents in just 24 hours. This brought its vaccination rate to 16.84 percent, globally behind only Israel. Across the Gulf and into Europe, the situation also looks promising. The UK has ordered 100 million doses of the Oxford vaccine and 50 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, which will be enough to inoculate 100 million people – significantly more than its 67 million people.
The race to mass vaccination is not so much a race against death (which has mercifully spared Africa by and large), but actually a race against economic ruin, Africa needs a way out and urgently so
The EU, Brazil, Canada, USA, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, you name it – every consequential region and country on earth has rolled out a COVID-19 mass vaccination plan and started to action it. All of them that is, except Africa. Once again, the world’s second most populated continent appears to not be part of an important global conversation, and looks completely lost in a situation where lives and livelihoods are at stake. So where exactly is Africa this time around?
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Isomorphic mimicry – Africa’s plan?
Something that scholars and journalists have long noted about African policymakers is their predilection for merely copying the form of policymaking elsewhere, without implementing the substance. The EU exists, so we must have an AU with a similar level of staffing and bureaucracy to the EU, but with none of its actual teeth. NAFTA exists, so we introduce the AfCTA, only without any of the enabling infrastructure that actually makes NAFTA a reality, so we end up bungling and postponing the launch indefinitely. 100 points for form, 0 for substance.
This scenario appears to be playing out yet again across the African continent with regard to COVID-19 mass vaccinations. At a time when other countries and regions have been announcing multibillion-dollar government interventions to secure millions of vaccine doses for their residents, one would be forgiven for thinking that some African governments felt left out and so decided to start making similar announcements of their own – whether there was actually any capacity to deliver on these promises.
In December 2020, the Nigerian government announced plans to spend as much as $1.4 billion on COVID-19 vaccine acquisition. Bearing in mind that this was a country, which needed a $1.5 billion World Bank, loan around the same period just to remain afloat, it later turned out that this $1.4 billion was also apparently supposed to be sourced from borrowing. South Africa has also announced a grandiose multibillion-dollar plan for COVID-19 mass vaccination.
What these ambitious plans fail to account for apart from how they will be funded, is where the purported vaccine doses – already accounted for at full production for the next 2 years at least – will be sourced from. In reality, beyond the loud media announcements designed to copy those of industrialised countries, most African countries actually have no ability whatsoever to guarantee anything close to the number of doses they need to achieve herd immunity by the end of 2021. At a time when the race to herd immunity is also by proxy a race for full production and supply chain restarts across the world, every week and month that Africa lags behind is potentially disastrous.
Coordination is what Africa needs
Currently, the COVAX global partnership built around ensuring a measure of equitable access to COVID-19 vaccinations represents Africa’s clearest and most realistic path to achieving the required critical mass of vaccination to achieve herd immunity. What it does not guarantee however, is a timeframe for when these doses will be delivered.
According to an Oxfam report in September 2020, about 51 percent of COVID-19 doses available to be ordered have been reserved by a small group of rich countries that represent only 13 percent of the planet’s population. Needless to say, not a single African country is on this list. In fact 80 percent of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccines in production have already been ordered by a handful of countries, all of which are outside Africa.
To vaccinate 60% of its population (the estimated minimum requirement for herd immunity3), Africa will need about 1.5 billion doses of vaccine. (Its population is 1.2 billion, and most vaccine candidates require two doses.https://t.co/H4O2RkpiGg
— Akshaya Kumar (@AkshayaSays) November 24, 2020
Keeping in mind that the race to mass vaccination is not so much a race against death (which has mercifully spared Africa by and large), but actually a race against economic ruin, Africa needs a way out and urgently so. There is another option outside the COVAX initiative that might be useful to this end.
The COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (CTAP) is an initiative spearheaded by the Costa Rican government, which calls on the WHO to create a shared pool of rights to technologies, data and know-how that could be used to manufacture vaccines and other medical products involved in fighting COVID-19. If it is pushed through, this could perhaps be the only realistic way for Africa to keep its mass vaccination destiny in its own hands and avoid being left behind by the world, which would have disastrous implications.
At press time however, only Sudan, Tunisia, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa had endorsed the CTAP call to action. Nigeria you will notice, is conspicuously absent despite being least positioned to obtain vaccines from the global market in a timely manner, and also having one of Africa’s largest pharmaceutical industrial capacities. Africa’s other major economies including Kenya, Ghana, Angola and Tanzania are also missing.
Ultimately, the key to Africa keeping up with the world in this most important of races is cooperation and coordinated group action, which can only be precipitated by recognising where our interests currently lie. If the continent fails to do that this time, we will once again find ourselves gazing wistfully at the rest of the world from yet another bottom rung of humanity’s many totem poles. Let’s hope someone who can do something about it is reading this.
