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Africa’s largest-ever vaccination drive is well under way. Forty-nine African countries are rolling out COVID-19 vaccines and over 22 million doses have been given on the continent. Valuable lessons are emerging, but major risks and challenges threaten Africa’s fragile gains.

Zimbabwe has upscaled the use of antigen rapid diagnostic tests to reinforce its COVID-19 response, hitting a daily rate of 4000 tests – a fourfold increase reached within just two months after the method was launched in November 2020.

The emergence of COVID-19 and the pandemic have raised many challenges regarding treatment and spawned the use of unproven therapies. Professor Lucille Blumberg, the Deputy Director of the South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases, discusses the causes, the risks and how to tackle unproven COVID-19 cures.

On a sultry morning in early March in the small town of Gouécké in south-eastern Guinea, scores of concerned community and customary leaders gathered for a meeting with WHO’s local team of social anthropologists.

Freetown, 11 May 2021 – Ebola vaccination kicked off today in Sierra Leone as the country takes proactive public health measures to protect people at high risk of infection in case of any potential cross-border transmission of the disease from the ongoing outbreak in neighbouring Guinea.

Young Sylvania Randriambelo breastfeeds her 2-month-old baby, as she pays rapt attention to what the senior nurse is telling her at the newly refurbished “Centre Ami de la Vaccination” of the University Teaching Hospital (Centre Hospitalier Universitaire, CHU) Tanambao-Diego, in the Diana Region of Madagascar. The centre is the latest addition to five others, bringing the total number of such centres in the country to six.