Sun 25 July 2021:
According to Oxford University’s website ourworldindata.org, the number of COVID-19 vaccination shots given around the world surpassed 3.83 billion as of Saturday.
China, where the outbreak first emerged in late 2019, ranks first globally, with more than 1.52 billion vaccine jabs delivered within the country, according to the available data, followed by India with nearly 427.88 million jabs.
The US has delivered over 340.36 million shots, followed by Brazil with over 131.52 million.
The vaccination campaigns in Germany (88.47 million), the UK (83.24 million) and Japan (73.97 million) also continue apace.
‘Failure to Share’
As rich countries open up and start vaccinating less vulnerable younger people, poor countries are struggling to secure vaccines. In Africa and elsewhere, such as Haiti, health authorities have barely begun mass roll-outs.
Worldwide, wealthy nations have administered about half of total COVID-19 vaccine doses, compared with just 0.4% in low-income countries, WHO figures from last month show, revealing glaring vaccine inequality.
The gap could widen still further as some governments order millions of booster doses to tackle a spike in cases linked to the highly contagious Delta variant, before others have received supplies for health workers and other high-risk groups.
“The global failure to share vaccines equitably is fuelling the pandemic,” said Tarik Jasarevic, a WHO spokesperson.
As COVID-19 vaccines are generally given in two separate doses per person, the count of administered vaccines does not mean that the same number of people has been vaccinated.
So far, only about 18 million people in Africa, a continent of 1.3 billion, have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 due largely to vaccine shortages, as well as widespread hesitancy.
But infections and deaths have jumped in recent weeks as more contagious variants take hold, shining a spotlight on the world’s so-called vaccine deserts — places that are either unable or unwilling to undertake mass inoculation.
While a lack of vaccines has been the biggest hurdle to mass immunisations in Africa, Burundi, Tanzania, and Eritrea have been outliers — rejecting WHO advice to join COVAX on the grounds they have cases under control. Tanzania has since changed tack.
Eritrea has recorded about 30 coronavirus deaths, while Burundi has reported eight, according to the WHO.
Since December 2019, the pandemic has claimed more than 4.14 million lives across the world, with an excess of 193.1 million cases reported, according to US-based Johns Hopkins University.
