The Lancet Global Health recently published a commentary article: “Addressing challenges to rolling out COVID-19 vaccines in African countries,” giving an Africa overview of challenges related with Covid-19 vaccine roll-out, especially considering the emergence of variants and quick spread.
Among the issues highlighted include countries testing capacity, sequencing facilities, storage and distribution, as well as vaccine hesitancy, even among health care workers. Impact on children and schools is also discussed.
The authors also present the need to build vaccine manufacturing capacity in Africa in a consolidated manner for reduced cost of the vaccines.
African governments are urged to place special focus on vaccine storage, pharmacovigilance, effective distribution and to design proper health communication messages to address the big challenge of vaccine hesitancy, of which the authors call for more research as to its driving factors.
Read the full article here.