Sixteen African countries have shown interest in securing Covid-19 vaccines under an African Union (AU) initiative and the aim is to deliver allocations in the next three weeks, Reuters news agency quotes the the head of a continental disease control body as saying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, John Nkengasong, director of the AU’s Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, did not give a specific date.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The AU initially secured 270 million doses from manufacturers for member states, then late last month said it would receive another 400 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
African states that have started rolling out vaccines include Egypt, Guinea, Morocco and Seychelles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
South Africa, which has the highest number of Covid-19 cases and deaths on the continent, received its first shipment of vaccines on Monday but the vaccination campaign has not yet started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many African states are buying vaccines through an international scheme, separate to the AU effort, called Covax, but some are also planning to negotiate supplies directly from pharmaceutical companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Covax scheme aims to make it easier for poorer countries to buy vaccines amid growing concerns that wealthier nations are snapping them up and practising “vaccine nationalism”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sixteen African countries have shown interest in securing Covid-19 vaccines under an African Union (AU) initiative and the aim is to deliver allocations in the next three weeks, Reuters news agency quotes the the head of a continental disease control body as saying. However, John Nkengasong, director of the AU’s Africa Centres for Disease Control […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27983,"featured_media":21294,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_paywall_metabox":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[467,98],"tags":[31],"class_list":["post-21293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health","category-news","tag-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27983"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21293"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21295,"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21293\/revisions\/21295"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}