‘Africa to be a priority for G7’s vaccines’
AFRICA will get priority treatment for the Group of Seven’s pledged 870 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine, a senior World Health Organization adviser has said.
“You will see that Africa is one of the most vulnerable, under-served (areas), so the priority would be for doses to go… to the African continent writ large. Those numbers will be sorted out in the coming weeks,” Bruce Aylward, a senior WHO adviser and coordinator of the ACT (Access to COVID-19 Tools) Accelerator, told an online news briefing from Geneva.
The WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has welcomed the G7’s weekend pledge of 870 million COVID-19 vaccine doses but said that many more were needed and quickly.
“This is a big help, but we need more, and we need them faster,” Ghebreyesus told a WHO news conference yesterday. Some 10,000 people are still dying each day from the disease and critically ill patients in Africa had a higher mortality rate, he said.
