Rwanda received its first vaccine doses earlier this month and has since rolled out a vaccination campaign, targeting priority groups like frontline medics, teachers and people with underlying health conditions among others. By Wednesday, March 23, a total of 348,629 people had been inoculated at least once, as the country wound up the first phase of the campaign. Going forward, according to Dr Sabin Nsanzimana, the Director-General of RBC, the date for getting another consignment of vaccines is not yet known, though he hopes it could be soon. “The biggest challenge now in this vaccination campaign is access to enough doses that are needed and on time. As I said before, all the doses we received both AstraZeneca and Pfizer have been utilized, and we are expecting the next doses,” he said while speaking during a virtual press briefing organised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) He added; “We don’t know the exact date and time when they will be available. We hope it could be very soon.” The largest number of doses shipped in the country were secured through the COVAX initiative, a WHO-backed mechanism that is assisting low and middle-income countries to access the Covid-19 vaccine. Currently, the initiative has delivered vaccine doses to many African countries, save for ten including Eritrea, Madagascar, Tanzania, Burundi, CAR, Cameroon, Chad, Zambia Burkina Faso, and Mauritania which are yet to get their first consignments. The target of the initiative is to have 20 per cent of the African population vaccinated by the end of this year, however, there have been challenges that have slowed down the delivery process. Richard Mihigo, the Coordinator of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases Unit at WHO African Region Office, told media during the same online briefing that the “20 per cent of the population” inoculation goal is still within reach. “This goal is still valid and we are working hard to make sure that the vaccine doses will be delivered to reach 20 per cent of the population, through the COVAX initiative before the end of the year,” he said. Mihigo also reflected on the need for Africa to develop its capacities to manufacture vaccines in the long run, urging that if another pandemic comes, it should not find the continent in the same position where it is hard to manufacture vaccines. “If we are to learn something out of this pandemic, it is about how this region can to try to invest in our local capacity to produce vaccines, because we cannot wait until another pandemic,” he said. “There is a lot of efforts going on through the African Union and the WHO about supporting countries to try at least establish some capacities (in line with manufacturing vaccines),” he said Meanwhile, Nsanzimana reiterated that vaccination currently does not replace the rest of the preventive measures that people should follow. “The vaccine is not coming to replace masks immediately. It is not coming to replace social distance and everything that we have been doing before,” he said.
