蜜芽传媒

At the Global Covid-19 Summit, President Joe Biden committed to giving away another 500 million doses of coronavirus vaccines. A welcome gesture - though of course Western countries are expected to have a surplus number of vaccine doubling that figure in the next year. In Sub-Saharan African countries less than three per cent of the adult population has been vaccinated.

However, last week the head of Pfizer said he expected vaccine hesitancy in Africa would be a major problem. But will it? Laura Lopez Gonzalez is a health and science writer based in Johannesburg, South Africa and has been investigating.

"I've heard many pharmaceutical executives tell the story that vaccine hesitancy would be much worse in Africa and it's in part based on the flawed notion that Africa hasn't been hard-hit by Covid-19. There isn't credible evidence to back that because most African countries can't collect routine death data, is what demographers have told me.

"But the fiction... with no data to back it, seems on the one hand a message that the science behind the vaccine - which would be used to convince a person in Europe to vaccinate - would be less understood by a person in Africa. I think that's problematic is not downright racist. But it's also the continuation of a sort of paternalism in medicine that I've seen in HIV for instance."

(Pic: A dose of vaccine being prepared; Credit: Getty Creative)

Show less