Africa is doing very poorly in corona vaccination statistics. Poverty, capitalism and a sense of insecurity are good candidates to be blamed, says academy researcher Salla Sariola.
Africa’s corona vaccination situation lags badly behind the rest of the world.
Although about 62 percent of the world’s population has received the full series of vaccines, only 21 percent of the population in Africa has been vaccinated. The variation in the situation can be huge between African countries.
– If the starting point is to assume that everyone needs to get the vaccines to be safe, then that is definitely not happening at the moment, academy researcher Salla Sariola from the University of Helsinki says.
Why haven’t enough vaccines been given or taken in African countries? Sariola says that there are several reasons in practice.
Source: World Health Organization WHO
Poverty is the number one obstacle
According to Sariola, who specializes in international health issues, what happened to the poor countries of the world with corona vaccines was the same as with many other things: the African Union was not able to compete immediately in contract negotiations with vaccine companies, so the continent was left behind.
– There was no money. The end result was that it was thought that African countries could catch up on vaccines with the help of charity programs. But their capacity has been bad from the start, and the desired schedule has not been realized.
Sariola says that she is disappointed with the way corona vaccines were handled. Vaccines were not distributed equally, but the world’s richest peeled off the best first.
Vaccine information is not public property
One problem lies in the patent rights of different vaccine preparations. If vaccines were openly available to everyone, their intangible rights would not be earmarked for companies, but would be general public property.
– Now the company gets to keep its exclusive rights to the vaccine and decide who it sells to and with whom it makes contracts.
Several countries have long supported the liberalization of vaccine patents. Even the United States is willing to deviate from the norm when it comes to vaccines.
Sariola says that the European Commission – and most of all pharmaceutical giant Germany – still stands in the way of liberalization.
At the same time, some other EU countries feel that it does not concern them in any way.
– As long as Finland doesn’t think about anything, Germany can do what it wants.
Although governments make the decisions and finance vaccine research, the financial benefit of owning patents still goes to the company that produces the vaccines, not to the government.
The actions of the country’s management matter
The same concerns as in Western countries, such as vaccine reliability and side effects, also plague some Africans. However, skepticism towards medicine is not the main reason why vaccines have not been given or taken enough in African countries.
According to Sariola, the skepticism of some African countries towards vaccines is related to previous failures and corruption of public authorities. The people may think that the actions of the government cannot be trusted.
– It could be about how previous epidemics have been handled or how reliable the government is considered to be.
However, people’s doubts about vaccines are not the first concern that Sariola thinks should be considered. There can be no opposition if there is nothing to oppose. The vaccines must first be distributed before other problems arise and are solved.
Not all countries have the same problems. For example, in Botswana, up to 68 percent of residents have received their first corona vaccine.
– The general development situation of the countries is very much reflected in how well vaccines have been given to people.
In Burundi, the vaccine has not been taken nearly enough
Small Burundi, sandwiched between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania, started vaccinations months later than most African countries. Sariola has interpreted that the problem was simply poverty.
– If the country’s political leadership doesn’t put an issue on its agenda, the issue just won’t get taken care of. If a disease is on the agenda of Western countries, it does not directly mean that the issue is important locally.
When the vaccine issue did not progress at all in Burundi, the responsibility was finally taken by, for example, humanitarian organizations and the international vaccination cooperation project Covax, whose task is to speed up the development of corona vaccines, large-scale procurement and equal, global distribution.
Burundi received funding for vaccines and began vaccinating its residents last October. However, the promising start did not produce the desired result: only about 0.13 percent of Burundi’s population, or twenty thousand, have received the vaccine.
Even Sariolak can only guess the reasons for the country’s microscopically low vaccination rate.
– It may be that Corona is no longer felt there, just like it is not elsewhere. People live their normal lives and think that we can manage here.
The reason why the vaccine situation got out of hand so quickly after the beginning may again be due to money. For example, vaccine campaigning and implementation of vaccinations carried out like Finland would not be possible in a poor country like Burundi.
– A large part of Burundi’s population lives in rural areas and in very poor conditions. If vaccines are not available in rural areas, they will not be sought elsewhere. It can also be thought that there are many other diseases that need to be treated first and foremost.
“In a pandemic, there would have been an opportunity to turn commercial health into common solidarity”
Covax set the goal of having 70 percent of the world’s population vaccinated against the corona virus by mid-2022. The goal has still not been reached, and herd protection against the corona will most likely never be realized in Africa, for example.
Does the vaccination situation in African countries still have a chance to influence the world’s corona situation, as has been previously assessed?
– I probably would have said half a year ago that this will all continue. Now I dare not make predictions about how the variants will change and whether there will be serious disease spikes. The virus may continue to live among us, but there will be no more serious symptoms.
Most of all, Sariola is worried that the world might not learn enough from the pandemic. Now, when the pandemic is easing, serious equality issues can be swept under the rug again.
– We could have learned something about how health is approached internationally. Health is everyone’s right. It would have been great if we could have turned this logic of commercial health into global solidarity, but I think that will not be done now.