UK's COVID-19 Vaccines Donations Reaching African Nations - Gavi

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 14th August, 2021) The United Kingdom has made donations of millions of AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines to the global sharing initiative COVAX that already are reaching African countries, Gavi, the vaccine alliance, said on Friday.

"The UK has pledged to share 80 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines with COVAX, as part of a broader pledge to share 100 million doses with the rest of the world. The UK Government has already committed �548 million in funding to the Gavi COVAX Advance Market Commitment," Gavi said in a press release.

Those shipments will reach Zambia with 119,200 doses, 51,840 doses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 119,040 doses are due to arrive in Malawi, 140,160 to Senegal, 299,680 doses to Egypt and 299,520 doses are scheduled to touch down in Uganda. All shipments will reach the African continent by the end of August. The UK has donated 5 million doses to COVAX already and the total doses about to be shipped to Africa in this delivery is 3 million.

"Three million doses of UK-donated vaccines are now arriving in 11 countries across Africa, including Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda, to help the fight against COVID-19. This is the first batch of 80 million being donated via COVAX - because we know no one is safe until everyone is safe," Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom Dominic Raab said, as quoted in the press release.

Developing countries have low vaccination rates and the situation is getting worse, as infections, especially from the COVID-19 Delta variant, are rising. The inequalities become more obvious when statistics are reviewed. In the European Union at the moment, 57.8% of the population is vaccinated with at least one dose of the vaccine. In the United States this figure is 56.8%. At the same time, in very large developing countries with hundreds of millions of people, those percentages are in the single digits.