Fueled by unrealistic politicians like Karl Lauterbach, who are sitting on millions of superfluous vaccine doses and still ordering new deliveries for billions of euros, the production of the Covid vaccine is still running at full speed. However: The vaccination campaigns are currently coming to a standstill worldwide. The vaccine is there, but the number of people willing to be vaccinated is increasingly approaching zero. Now even in Africa, whose minimal vaccination rate is always negatively emphasized and is often justified with a lack of vaccine, deliveries of further doses are being refused.
In particular, the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna have always been considered liquid gold that was unfairly denied to developing countries. That has changed: Vaccine manufacturers could deliver in bulk. Both the African Union and WHO-backed group Covax have recently refused to buy millions of doses of Moderna’s Spikevax vaccine. Because even developing countries now have vaccines in stock – but distribution is difficult. Not least because the population shows no interest in vaccination.
“The vaccine landscape has changed drastically in the past few months,” Safura told Abdool Karim, a public health advocate and researcher in Johannesburg who focuses on equity in the pandemic Bloomberg. “We no longer urgently need vaccines, we have them now.”
In Africa, only 15 percent of the population is considered vaccinated. The WHO said in March that the average global immunization coverage was 57 percent, so the continent is lagging far behind. Of the 700 million vaccine doses that Africa has received, only around 400 million have been vaccinated. More vaccine is simply not needed. Even without serious restrictions on freedom and brutal vaccination campaigns, Africa got through the so-called “pandemic” very well.
Moderna announced in October last year that it would send 110 million doses of its vaccine to the African Union to want to deliver – at extra low prices. However, as Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel announced in March, the union eventually called it off, informing Moderna that the vaccine is not needed. The world is now “into an oversupply of vaccines,” according to Bancel.
Jeremy Farrar, director of the highly controversial British foundation Wellcome, which benefited greatly from the “pandemic”., nevertheless believes that production should not be shut down. With a new variant, demand (and thus profit) could eventually increase again, so the argument goes.
