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