How Africa can save the world from a never-ending Covid-19 pandemic

If Africa is not vaccinated and remains a source of coronavirus mutations, the whole world will be at risk

As the rest of the world prepares for a vaccine-driven return to normal over the next few months, at her community health centre in a poor, working-class neighbourhood of Cape Town, Andrea Mendelsohn is dreading the arrival of April and May — that’s when the weather will get cooler in the southern hemisphere and bring a surge in coronavirus cases.

Few people in South Africa —aside from medical staff like Mendel­sohn — will be vaccinated by then. Elsewhere on the continent even health workers won’t be inoculated, making Afri­ca a large reservoir of the virus that has infected almost 117 million people across the globe and killed more than 2.5 million.

Most countries in Africa have yet to start inoculating their citizens. While developed countries have rushed to vaccinate their populations against Covid-19,  fewer than half a million people have received shots in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region of 1.1 billion people. In contrast, the US, with a population of about 330 million, has administered over 90 million vaccine doses, while more than a third of the UK’s 67 million people have gotten at least one shot.

But anyone in the developed world who thinks they are unaffected by large swaths of un-vaccinated people in Africa, needs to think again, says Phionah Atuhebwe, the New Vaccines Introduction Medical Officer on the continent for the World Health Organization. As long as the pandemic continues to rage among un-vaccinated populations, spawning new, more virulent, vaccine-resistant strains, no one is safe, she said.

“The virus will definitely mutate and will keep mutating; the longer we keep the virus around, the more mutations we’ll see,” Atuhebwe said in an interview from Brazzaville, in the Republic of Congo. “If Africa is not vaccinated and we are a source of mutations, we put the whole world at risk.”

Already the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca Plc and the University of Oxford has proved largely ineffective in preventing mild disease from infections with a strain of the virus first identified in South Africa. 

Rich nations pre-paid for their vaccines and also got organised quicker and earlier, leaving countries in Africa scrambling for scraps. The affluent world’s vaccine grab was characterised in January by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus as a “catastrophic moral failure”. Just 10 countries administered 75 per cent of all vaccinations, United Nations Secre­tary-General An­to­­nio Guterres said in Febr­­uary, calling it “wil­d­ly uneven and unfair”.

A report by anti-poverty group One said last month that the world’s richest countries are on track to accumulate over 1 billion more doses than they need to fully vaccinate their populations, adding that the excess shots alone would be sufficient to inoculate the entire adult population of Africa.

“It’ll be a fatal mistake if the developed world sees this as a case where we’ll vaccinate our people and then people in other parts of the world take care of their own business,” said John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Center for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The mad dash to corner vaccines shows rich countries have learned little from the global swine flu pandemic in 2009, when poor nations were left high and dry, says Helen Rees, chairwoman of the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority. Despite the heightened risk of the virus spreading with increased interconnectedness, “there was not a thought about what would happen to the rest of the world,” she said.

Countries from Nigeria to Ethiopia and Zimbabwe have large numbers of their citizens living and working in Europe, North America and even Asia, and regular flights mean that just as easily as the virus arrived in Africa from Europe, mutated strains could be spread into the developed world by returning travellers.