Amnesty International (AI) has called on countries in East Africa to take more decisive action to ensure that groups most at-risk from the Covid-19 pandemic can access vaccines.
The human rights group made the call against the backdrop of accusation that global pharmaceutical firms are denying low and lower-middle income countries in the region enough Covid-19 jabs to vaccinate their populations.
In a new report titled Address the Access Issue and the Pandemic will be Managed Tomorrow: Global Vaccine Inequity’s Impact in East Africa, AI noted that countries in the region have the lowest vaccination rates in the world.
Data from the report shows that just 0.1 percent of Burundi’s entire population has been fully vaccinated. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the figure is at 0.7 percent, while Eritrea has yet to start any vaccination programme.
Rwanda, meanwhile, has the highest population of those who have taken Covid-19 jabs (29 percent), followed by Kenya at five percent, Somalia at four percent and Sudan at 2.75 percent.
AI also noted that low- and middle-income countries have been found to have higher levels of Covid-19 vaccine acceptance than high-income countries.
‘For many months epidemiologists have warned that “persistent low vaccine coverage in many countries would make it more likely for vaccine resistant mutations to appear” ‘, the report read.
‘While the origins of the new highly mutated Omicron variant are for now unknown, its recent detection by scientists in Southern Africa demonstrates that the emergence of potentially vaccine-resistant mutations remains a very real risk.
‘In addition to the direct threat posed by the virus itself, the lack of sufficient doses impacts people’s lives and rights in numerous other ways.
‘Hindered from rolling out timely, predictable and therefore effective mass vaccination campaigns, governments in several countries in East Africa, the Horn and Great Lakes have maintained strict measures aimed at preventing the spread of Covid-19 much longer than in countries where vaccine supply has been plentiful’.
The report called on wealthy countries and pharmaceutical companies to urgently increase the global supply of Covid-19 vaccines through the temporary suspension of intellectual property rights and sharing of technology and resources.
The People’s Vaccine Alliance had earlier stated that lack of access to vaccines globally contributed to the outbreak of Omicron and other new Covid-19 variants.
In October 2020, India and South Africa introduced a document requesting a waiver from certain provisions of the TRIPS agreement for the prevention, containment and treatment of Covid-19.
If countries agree on the waiver, countries can choose not to grant or enforce IP (patents, industrial designs, copyright, and trade secrets) related to all Covid-19 medical products and technologies.
42 countries in Africa missed the global goal of vaccinating the most vulnerable ten percent of every country’s population against Covid-19 by the end of September, data from the World Health Organisation (WHO) shows.
WHO and its partners have, however, said they hope to provide Africa with about 30 percent of the Covid-19 vaccines the continent needs by February 2022.
Source: Amnesty International
Photo source: AMISOM
