11:34 | Geneva, Dec. 12.
The Covax program, created in 2020 to bring COVID-19 vaccines to developing countries, has managed to distribute 1.84 billion doses in 146 countries, said Seth Berkley, executive director of the GAVI Vaccine Alliance, a of the main sponsors of the initiative.
Thanks to this programme, which also involves the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 79% of health workers in beneficiary countries have been able to get vaccinated, a percentage even higher than that of developed countries (70%).
Despite the progress, in many less developed countries vaccination coverage is still very low and there are even eight countries where it does not yet reach 10% of the general population (Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Senegal, Yemen, Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic of Congo and Haiti, according to GAVI data).
In the press conference, where GAVI discussed the results for 2022 and the objectives for the next exercise, it was also noted that the pandemic has reduced routine vaccinations against other diseases, which are now 5% lower than in before the covid (at the beginning of the health crisis it fell by 40%).
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Those responsible for the alliance, which was awarded the Princess of Asturias in 2020 for cooperation, also stressed that 12.5 million children worldwide have not received doses of any vaccine necessary for their protection against infectious diseases.
Berkley recalled that, in the 20 years of work of GAVI, the alliance has vaccinated more than a billion children against 18 different diseases and it is estimated that with this the alliance has helped to save 16.2 million lives.
Of the 1.84 billion doses of anti-vid vaccines distributed under the Covax program since 2021, 512 million were produced by Pfizer-BioNTech, 288 million by AstraZeneca, 274 million by Johnson & Johnson, 292 million by the Serological Institute of India, 187 million from Moderna and 118 million from Sinovac.
Berkley noted that the first vaccines in developing countries arrived in 2020 just 40 days after they also began to be widely distributed in developed economies, a timescale unprecedented in previous health crises.
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Published: 12/12/2022
