The Africa Medical Supplies Platform (AMSP), on behalf of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), on Tuesday, commenced the COVID-19 vaccines pre-order programme for all African Union Member States.
This follows the announcement by the African Union (AU) Chairperson, President Cyril Ramaphosa last week, that the AU has secured a provisional 270 million COVID-19 vaccine doses for Africa through its COVID-19 African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team (AVATT).
In the statement by Africa CDC, the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) will facilitate payments by providing advance procurement commitment guarantees of up to US$2 billion to the manufacturers on behalf of the member States.
While AVATT has secured a provisional 270 million COVID-19 vaccines doses from Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, AMSP, the single-source platform enabling faster, more transparent and cost-effective access to COVID-19 supplies, opened pre-orders on Tuesday, offering equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines doses for the 55 Member States.
AU Special Envoy Strive Masiyiwa says, “These are historical times. For the first time in history, Africa has secured access to millions of vaccine doses in the middle of a pandemic as most of the Western countries. There is still a huge shortage of vaccine doses and that is why this continental collaboration has designed a fair allocation coupled with timely and equitable access of COVID-19 vaccines across the continent.”
Below is the full statement:
Last week, Ramaphosa said that the millions of coronavirus vaccine doses secured by the African Union will be allocated according to countries’ population size.
No African countries have begun large-scale coronavirus vaccination campaigns and the AU’s 270 million shots, if administered two per person, would still only cover around 10% of the continent’s 1.3 billion people.
