By AFP
France is providing 10 million doses of AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines for Africa over the next three months, President Emmanuel Macron’s office announced on Monday.
The jabs “will be allocated and distributed in the framework of the African Union’s African Vaccine Acquisition Trust (AVAT) and COVAX.
“The (COVID-19) pandemic can only be overcome through intense cooperation,” Macron said in a statement that emphasized, “our solid partnership” with the AU.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who with Macron has strongly attacked unequal access to vaccines, hailed the announcement as a “strong and welcome gesture of human solidarity and political cooperation at a time when the world most needs it.”
The statement by Macron’s office said that enough jabs had now been purchased through AVAT to enable vaccination of 400 million people in Africa — a third of the continent’s population — by September 2022, at a cost of three billion dollars.
Separately, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday that the Republic of Congo had received more than 300,000 vaccines doses from the United States, its first under COVAX.
The donation amounts to 302,400 jabs of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the agency’s African branch said on Twitter.