The executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) on Sunday considered that economic prosperity on the continent depends on vaccines, lamenting that only 2.3% of Africa’s population has already been immunised.
“The path to economic prosperity today is through vaccines against covid-19, but only 2.3 per cent of Africa’s 1.3 billion population has been vaccinated,” Vera Songwe lamented.
Quoted in a UNECA press release, the UN Deputy Secretary-General recalled the target of 30 per cent vaccination by December this year and stressed that if group immunity is to be achieved, these figures must reach at least 60 or 70 per cent.
During the monthly panel which was attended by the director of the African Union Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), Songwe argued that African states should pay for the vaccines because this gives them independence from donors.
“The fact that Africa has managed to come together to distribute its own vaccines, not free vaccines, for the continent is clearly a way of ensuring prosperity,” he stressed, concluding that “paying for what you need is a guarantee that you will get it, because if you wait for donations, the uncertainty around vaccines increases.”
Present at the panel, according to UNECA, the director of the Africa CDC, John Nkengasong, stressed that “health system strengthening is not a cost but an investment” and argued that health should be at the centre of policies.
“Africa must put the public health agenda at the centre, both of the political and economic dialogue, because nobody drills a well when they are thirsty, wells are drilled before we are thirsty, and so you do not develop a health system in the middle of a pandemic, but you do it in preparation for another pandemic,” he argued.
