Mbabane: The African Union (AU) is planning to vaccinate 60 percent of all citizens on the continent by the end of the year.
This was revealed at an AU Centre for Disease Control (CDC) webinar on Wednesday.
The latest data on the AU CDC portal shows almost 95,000 people have passed away in Africa after contracting the coronavirus. Close to 2.8 million patients have recovered across the continent.
The AU CDC said Africa needed vaccines and they needed it now.
Dr John Nkengasong is the director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
“What we need for this battle is vaccines, the vaccines are coming in slowly but what we have we will use in fighting this pandemic and the war at hand,” said.
He said they had plans in place for vaccinations.
“And that means we are striving to immunise 720 million people that will require over one billion doses if the vaccines that we end up using requires two doses.”
Eswatini minister of health Lizzie Nkosi had earlier reported that the Kingdom will procure 15 percent of the 270 million doses that were secured by the African Union. This translates to 237 328 doses.
Nkosi said the breakdown of the allocation from the AU will be as follows; Pfizer/BioTech Vaccine (43 950); Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine (87 899) and Johnson & Johnson vaccine (105 479). All these doses are expected in the second quarter of 2021.
The country had started its vaccination roll-out with health workers, senior government officials including the Acting Prime Minister, a few cabinet Ministers, judges to name a few.
The country has been seeing a decline in number of active cases, a decline in fatalities and an increase in number of people recovering from the COVID-19 scourge. As of Thursday, the number of confirmed cases stood at 17 301, while the number of people who are still undergoing treatment stood at 455 as 16 175 people have recovered.
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