The COVAX vaccine facility has delivered practically 38.4 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to 102 international locations and economies throughout six continents, six weeks after it started to roll out provides, in keeping with a press release on Thursday.
The programme gives a lifeline to low-income international locations specifically, permitting them within the first occasion to inoculate well being employees and others at excessive danger, even when their governments haven’t managed to safe vaccines from the producers.
But there have been some delays, the GAVI vaccine alliance and World Health Organization mentioned in a press release.
Reduced availability of delayed some deliveries in March and April, and far of the output of the Serum Institute of India, which makes the AstraZeneca vaccine, is being stored in India, the place every day infections surpassed 100,000 for the primary time on Monday.
The Caribbean island of St. Lucia turned the one centesimal nation to obtain vaccines by way of COVAX. Iran, additionally battling a report charge of an infection, is one other current recipient.
The 102 international locations reached to this point embrace 61 benefiting from a mechanism primarily financed by donors.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Monday referred to as it a “travesty” that some international locations nonetheless didn’t have sufficient vaccines to start inoculating well being employees and probably the most weak.
GAVI mentioned final month that it deliberate to ship 237 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine – which has been produced at price for a couple of {dollars} a dose, and doesn’t require the superior refrigeration of another coronavirus vaccines – to 142 international locations by the tip of May.
“COVAX may be on track to deliver to all participating economies in the first half of the year, yet we still face a daunting challenge as we seek to end the acute stage of the pandemic,” GAVI chief govt Seth Berkley mentioned within the assertion.
Nonetheless, COVAX nonetheless expects to ship at the least 2 billion doses this 12 months 2021, and to diversify the providing past the AstraZeneca/Oxford and Pfizer/BioNTech photographs it’s at present supplying.
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