Remarks by WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr Matshidiso Moeti
Thank you very much, Dr Tedros,
It’s a great pleasure to join you, and join all of our partners, and I very much appreciated our discussions earlier on, and to join our journalist colleagues, for this press conference.
Much has already been said about the challenges in global vaccine supplies so I will go to the question which is very often asked: do African countries have the capacity to absorb the vaccines when they get them? My colleagues and I believe the answer is yes. Although as Seth said, we are working very hard to make sure that their preparedness is up to speed. The continuous challenge is that global supplies are just not being shared in ways that will get all of us in the world out of this pandemic in time.
African countries are standing by to hugely ramp-up their rollouts, having learnt a lot from the delivery of the first vaccines that they received. Quite a few of them have done detailed analysis, of what went well, what gaps were identified, and are working very hard to fill them.
As WHO in the Region, we have worked with them to develop revised, detailed, local plans, to mobilize the delivery capacity needed. Intense work is going on to put the right storage capacity in place, including cold chain, to adapt delivery strategies to handle the multiple vaccines that countries are receiving, to use technology for registration and tracking systems, to mobilize and prepare enough vaccinators, most importantly to mobilize the people and address hesitancy and misinformation.
Hundreds of WHO staff are on the ground, backed up by our team in the Regional Office and Headquarters and working within the COVAX partnership, ready to support countries to expand vaccination sites and to manage all the complexities of such a big operation.
What’s more, I’d like to say that African countries have done this before – although perhaps not quite to this scale – successfully implementing huge vaccination campaigns against polio, yellow fever and cholera.
Of the doses already received, three-quarters have already been administered and some countries are repeatedly now indicating they are hitting barriers simply of limited supplies.
So, I would like to join the appeal to pharmaceutical companies and to countries that have vaccinated their high-risk groups and to the citizens of those countries to add their voice – share vaccines with African countries urgently, to release reserve vaccine supplies for AVAT and COVAX to purchase, so that we work together to protect the most at-risk groups everywhere, and we can end this pandemic together.
Again, I’d like to say that I look forward very much to working with John, with Vera, with Strive and our partners at the African Union and within the COVAX mechanism to support our countries.
Thank you.