African countries face increasing travel bans from outside the continent in the face of the new COVID-19 variant, Omicron. However, travel bans have not shown much success in curtailing the pandemic. Travel bans don’t save lives. Vaccines do.
Only 10 per cent of the African continent has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. In contrast, Europe, Asia and America have vaccinated 62 per cent, 72.4 per cent and 68.4 per cent of their populations, respectively. Only nine African countries met the World Health Organisation’s goal of vaccinating 10% of their citizens against COVID-19 by the end of September 2021. The WHO fixed the target as part of a more significant push to vaccinate at least 40% of the world’s population by the end of 2021. Unfortunately, four of the nine countries are among Africa’s smallest. This figure depicts how much Africa has fallen behind in its vaccination efforts.
Africa accounts for barely 1.6 % of worldwide vaccination. A combination of vaccine hesitancy and scarcity has resulted in a low vaccination rate. Even if vaccine hesitancy is a game-changer, vaccine availability is the biggest roadblock to vaccination on the continent. Vaccine hesitancy can be traced back to vaccine scarcity in many cases. When there is no vaccine available, the challenge of hesitation cannot be prioritised. Much of the worldwide vaccination effort has benefited wealthier countries. Over four billion COVID-19 vaccines have been distributed globally, with rich countries receiving 83% of the total…..
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