Ghana becomes the first country to receive World Health Organization’s first Covax vaccine sharing initiative batch.
The World Health Organization (WHO) programme aims to ensure that vaccines are shared fairly among all nations.
Covax is aiming to deliver about two billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines globally by the end of the year.
A total of 600,000 doses of the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University arrived in Ghana’s capital Accra on Wednesday.
WHO and Unicef jointly made a statement saying it was a “momentous occasion”.
The arrival of the Covid-19 vaccines into Ghana is critical in bringing the pandemic to an end,” the statement said.
Ghana has recorded more than 80,700 cases and the deaths have been recorded to be 580 since the pandemic. These numbers are believed to fall short of the actual toll because of low levels of testing.
WHO and Unicef said the shipment represented “part of the first wave of Covid vaccines headed to several low and middle-income countries”.
The Covax scheme was set up by WHO as the Gavi vaccines alliance and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) in an effort to avoid pushing back of the poorer countries from the queue of the vaccine reception.
The programme is designed so that richer countries buying vaccines agree to help finance access for poorer nations, too.
It aims to deliver to 190 countries two billion doses in less than a year. Particularly, it aims to provide 92 poorer countries the access to vaccines at the same time as 98 wealthier countries.
