COVID-19 vaccinology landscape in Africa

Abstract

More than two years after the start of COVID-19 pandemic, Africa still lags behind in terms vaccine distribution. This highlights the predicament of Africa in terms of vaccine development, deployment, and sustainability, not only for COVID-19, but for other major infectious diseases that plague the continent. This opinion discusses the challenges Africa faces in its race to vaccinate its people, and offers recommendations on the way forward. Specifically, to get out of the ongoing vaccine shortage trap, Africa needs to diversify investment not only to COVID-19 but also other diseases that burden the population. The continent needs to increase its capacity to acquire vaccines more equitably, improve access to technologies to enable local manufacture of vaccines, increase awareness on vaccines both in rural and urban areas to significantly reduce disease incidence of COVID-19 and as well as other prevalent diseases on the African continent such as HIV and TB. Such efforts will go a long way to reduce the disease burden in Africa.

Vaccine Inequity: A Threat to Africa’s Recovery from COVID-19

“…Through a data-driven, age-strati ed epidemic model to evaluate the effects of Covid-19 vaccine inequities focused on 20 LMICs from all WHO regions, it has been revealed that as of October 1, 2022, 77% of individuals in high and upper middle income countries completed the initial vaccination course, with its equivalent in LMICs being 50% [49]. In this same study, the vaccine coverage by October 1, 2021 in HICs was more than 1 dose per person while that of lower middle income countries was 40 doses per 100 and low income countries stood at 3.6 doses per 100, with these inequalities further discussed in several other studies [50,51,52,54,55]. In HICs, challenges related to vaccine hesitancy and dose scarcity have been anticipated, with governments implementing potential solutions like mass media interventions and population groups prioritization to increase uptake.…”

Vaccine inequity: a threat to Africa’s recovery from COVID-19

“…Through a data-driven, age-stratified epidemic model to evaluate the effects of COVID-19 vaccine inequities focused on 20 LMICs from all WHO regions, it has been revealed that as of October 1, 2022, 77% of individuals in high and upper middle-income countries completed the initial vaccination course, with its equivalent in LMICs being 50% [ 53 ]. In this same study, the vaccine coverage by October 1, 2021 in HICs was more than 1 dose per person while that of lower middle-income countries were 40 doses per 100 and low-income countries stood at 3.6 doses per 100, with these inequalities further discussed in several other studies [ 54 – 58 ]. In HICs, challenges related to vaccine hesitancy and dose scarcity have been anticipated, with governments implementing potential solutions like mass media interventions and population groups prioritization to increase uptake.…”

Third COVID-19 vaccine dose boosts antibody function in Rwandans with high HIV viral load

“… 12 Despite the COVAX (COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access) program, COVID-19 vaccines were also deployed later and slower in continental Africa. 14 , 15 It was estimated in October 2022 that over 9 million people in Rwanda had at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. At this time we know very little about the COVID-19 vaccine responses in PLWH in continental Africa since most studies have been conducted in higher-income countries.…”