U.S. National Public Radio has broadcast an interview with Dr. Ayoade Alakija, co-chair of the African Union’s African Vaccine Delivery Alliance. The issue is genocide against 1.4 billion Africans. As advanced nations are preparing to provide third and even fourth booster vaccines, meaning their people will have had available a total of 5-6 vaccination shots from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Africans are dying of the disease because only 7% of the population is fully vaccinated.
Dr. Alakija reports that she has been reviewing African access to vaccines and “all countermeasures, which includes diagnostics and new treatments as they become available.” This is “a deeply depressing role … as we have seen that the high-income countries of the world have clearly prioritized themselves but forgotten that the pandemic is affecting all of us.” As a result, “we failed to stop a virus that continues to march on.” The danger now increases as “new subvariants that are causing increasing infections, increasing hospitalizations, and increasing deaths,” due simply to “this lack of equity, this lack of access to the countermeasures for all of the world.”
Some believe that the infection rate and death rate are lower in Africa than in the advanced sector, but Dr. Alakija reports the obvious: “So many of these deaths have gone unrecorded. And therefore, there has been a silent pandemic, a silent toll on parts of this world where the inequity in measuring the impact of the pandemic itself is pushing the inequity of access to the countermeasures and to the tools needed to prevent further infection.”
