President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has said the unsavoury politics of vaccine nationalism that the world is witnessing, could potentially derail global efforts made at containing COVID-19.
President Akufo-Addo said, “till date, less than 10% of Africans have been vaccinated, in comparison to the EU, for example, which, as of August, had vaccinated 70% of its population.”
As of November 28, 2021, Africa had administered about 235 million doses of vaccine against the coronavirus, representing only 6.7 per cent of the African’s population fully vaccinated.
President Akufo-Addo said African countries have still not had sufficient access to vaccines and were worried that the phenomenon of hoarding vaccines could worsen even further, “as countries begin to administer booster shots in response to the threat posed by the omicron variant of the virus.”
President Akufo-Addo in his address at the European Union Parliament in Strasbourg, France on Tuesday, urged world leaders, especially, advanced countries, to make the vaccines available to all countries, as “no one is safe until everyone is safe.”
He said equitable access to vaccines was the best way to mitigate the economic, social and health consequences of the pandemic.
Ironically, President Akufo-Addo said, the predictions of Africa being hit hard by the pandemic because of her relatively weak public health systems — where dead bodies would be littered in her streets — had not come to pass.
“We were not given credit for quickly following the science as recommended, when many leaders in Europe were still fighting ideological battles, and seeking to lay blame on the source of the virus, rather than uniting to fight it,” President Akufo-Addo said.
At every stage, the President said, “We in Africa, have been dismayed to discover that every attempt was being made to make COVID-19 also an African disease. Thus, the narrative emerged that it was not really that Africans were not dying from the pandemic, we had to be covering up the true level of infections.”
He said Africa, which was caught up in the “vicious vaccine politics that engulfed the world”, was grateful for the donations of vaccines through platforms such as COVAX.
President Akufo-Addo, who is also ECOWAS Chair, reiterated the strong opposition of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), to the decision taken by countries, including those in the EU, to single out African countries for the imposition of travel bans.
Omicron, according to the President, had been discovered in over forty countries, with reports indicating that the variant was present in the Netherlands way before it was discovered in South Africa.
“The world should be grateful to the South African scientists, whose knowledge and expertise in genomic sequencing enabled them to identify the new variant. Plaudits, not the condemnation of their peoples, should have been their portion. Why is there not a travel ban imposed on the Netherlands, but against South Africa,” President Akufo-Addo asked?
Whilst acknowledging the importance of Africa building up her health delivery systems to enable the continent to withstand future crises, he told the EU Parliament that Ghana had launched Agenda 111 hospitals Project — which seeks to build district hospitals in each district of Ghana where there is none —so that ordinary people could have easy access to medical care.
In addition, Ghana has decided to set up a National Vaccine Institute, which would supervise the domestic production of vaccines across several sectors, including anti-COVID-19 ones, led by the private sector and business community.
“We need to be self-reliant, and shed the image of beggars living on charity, aid and handouts, and make better and more intelligent use of our abundant natural resources, to pull ourselves out of poverty to prosperity. These are not new aspirations; they have simply been reinforced by the lessons of the pandemic,” President Akufo-Addo stated.
Rex Mainoo Yeboah, ISD
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