Jakarta: Six hundred thousand doses of lifesaving covid-19 vaccine from the United Nations (UN)-partnered COVAX initiative have arrived in Ghana.
Confirming the news on Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that further supplies of the AstraZeneca/Oxford jab will reach Côte d’Ivoire later this week.
These are the first coronavirus shots from the COVAX scheme to be distributed outside India, where the vaccine is being produced under licence.
They were shipped from Mumbai to the Ghanaian capital, Accra, by the the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) as part of the first wave of vaccines headed to several low and middle income countries.
“With the first shipment of doses, we can make good on the promise of the COVAX Facility to ensure people from less wealthy countries are not left behind in the race for life-saving vaccines,” said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore in a press release on Wednesday.
The development comes as WHO reported a drop in covid-19 deaths for the third consecutive week. Some 66,000 deaths were reported last week, according to the UN agency’s latest update on the disease.
WHO said deaths have fallen in all regions except the Western Pacific, which recorded a six per cent increase. New infections also decreased by 11 per cent over the same period in four out of six regions.
Globally, there have been nearly 111 million cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, and more than 2.4 million deaths. The United States, Brazil, France, Russia and India continue to report the highest number of cases.
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