The World Health Organization urges rich countries to donate doses of Covid-19 vaccine to low-income countries instead of proceeding with child vaccination. In an address last May 14, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO MD, said: “I understand why some countries want to vaccinate their children and adolescents, but right now I urge them to reconsider and to instead donate vaccines to #COVAX”.

Data from the institution showed that more than 1.2 billion doses of vaccine have already been used worldwide but only 0.3% of vaccine supply goes to poor countries. This echoes the wide gap between rich and poor countries when it comes to access to vaccines.

As soon as the vaccines were put on the market, rich countries monopolized a large part of the orders, despite the Covax initiative, which was supposed to give poor countries access to more than two billion doses of vaccine by the end of 2021.

According to the WHO director, at the current pace, the second year of the pandemic is likely to be far more deadly than the first. He believes that vaccination in dribs and drabs is not an effective strategy to fight a deadly respiratory virus and calls for a closing of the gap between rich and poor countries in the progress of vaccination campaigns.

Moutiou Adjibi Nourou