US promises to boost Kenya’s December vaccination target with 4 million more Covid-19 jabs 

Kenya’s Covid-19 vaccine task force has said the country will attain its goal of vaccinating 10 million people by December, banking on a donation from the USA.

This comes after, Gavi-Covax, the Vaccine Alliance, a facility created by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to oversee procurement, allotment and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines to 92 countries that have signed up announced changes to its strategy and how it plans to allocate vaccines.    

As per Covax’s vaccine allocation round for October 2021, the mechanism disclosed that it will deliver the doses to only 39 of the 89 eligible low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs), while focusing on those with the lowest vaccine coverage.

According to the Independent Allocation of Vaccines Group (IAVG) -- made up of 12 scientists who have been advising Covax on vaccine distribution -- in a situation where there is so little vaccine to distribute, the volumes that some countries were receiving were so small that it had become almost absurd.

“We all felt that now when the overall distribution is so unequal between high and lower income countries, it makes sense to really try to focus on the very lowest end countries. There is a need to make sure everybody reaches a reasonable minimum level,” explained Swedish epidemiologist Anna Mia Ekström from the Karolinska Institutet, who is a member of the IAVG.

IAVG assures that there are no high-income countries on the allocation list, and of the 39 LMICs, the majority are in Africa, although the largest individual allocations go to Pakistan (12 million) and Bangladesh (9 million).

Egypt will receive 6•6 million doses, Ethiopia 3 million, Nigeria 2•5 million, and Uganda 2 million.

Brazil, Mexico, Morocco, and Sudan had earlier received millions of doses from Covax but are not included in the latest allocation.

Haiti, Nepal, Somalia, and Yemen are among the countries that do not appear on the list.

“This will not affect us at all because, as of late last week, we had received a Covid-19 dose commitments from the United States (US) and Covax. The US has assured it will send us three million Pfizer doses and Covax has pledged to send one million AstraZeneca doses, the dose commitments are running through December and this means we will have 13 million jabs in the country if you add the eight million doses that are already in the country. With that we will hit the target,” Dr Willis Akhwale, the country’s Covid-19 Vaccine Task Force chair disclosed to Nation in an exclusive interview on Monday.

Dr AKhwale further explained that the new Covax strategy will not affect Kenya because the country’s biggest procurement deal is through the African Vaccine Acquisition Taskforce (Avat).

“We have started seeing that the supplies are improving, and if you look at our deployment plan we expect 13 million J&J doses.

As much as we have been getting donations, the backbone of our plan is what we purchased through Avat.”

Dr Akhwale also disclosed that the Ministry of Health was working round the clock to have a ‘fill and finish’ plant in place. 

“As President Uhuru Kenyatta directed in his Mashujaa Day speech, the team is working very hard to ensure the ‘fill and finish’ plant is up by April next year and we have a strategic partnership with a team that already has a product approved by WHO,” Dr Akhwale disclosed.

Dr Catherine Kyobutungi, the executive director of African Population Health Research Centre (APHRC), however, told the Nation that the country many not achieve her set target due to geopolitical interests and manufacturing constraints.

“Covax right now is focused on mobilising donations and allocating them, I do not think they have a full say on where the doses should go as the countries that are donating also have their own geopolitical interests,” she said.

She further highlighted that considering 4,930,336 vaccines have so far been administered across the country, with 3,504,400 being partially vaccinated people, while the fully inoculated stand at 1,425,936, manufacturing and supply constraints remain a huge challenge that is out of the governments control.

“Rich countries can’t figure out when to release their dose donations too. In Canada, 400 million doses might expire because Canada is sitting on them and they are not sure at what point to release them and sometimes they do when it is very late. We need 12 million doses to attain the vaccination target by December and if Avat does not deliver, how will we get there?” she asked.

Amref Health Africa Group CEO Githinji Gitahi agrees with Dr Kyobutungi.

“Kenya as a country has three sources of vaccines. 

The first is direct purchase, which is taking time, and I don’t think they will deliver more than 2.5 million doses by the end of the year, considering they have only delivered two batches of about a million doses since we bought from them. The Covax route is going to be largely affected, not only because of their change in strategy, but also because the mechanism is changing approach. Whereas originally they were giving through equality, which is a population-based allocation, they are basically saying that they are moving now to those left behind first, which is the right thing to do. This means that Kenya, which has the ability to purchase, is unlikely to get priority from Covax unless there is a direct allocation through Covax by a bilateral state with pre-determined allocations, the third source is bilateral agreements,” he explained.

Dr Githinji, who is also an adviser to the task force is of the view that the country cannot meet its vaccination target.

“Based on the doses we have we, we might only end up jabbing 5.5 million Kenyans as the 4.5 million is going to be hard to find by December because J&J is not going to trickle in as we had anticipated, which means we are only left with the bilateral route and now the government has to go into high gear with the commitment from US and other countries,” he said.