Big pharma greed is keeping Covid vaccines out of the arms of Africans

Pharmaceutical giants are raking in billions selling doses to the richest countries, while Sub-Saharan Africa is struggling to save its people.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made. 

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As most African countries struggle to save lives with too few vaccine doses, health officials rely on mitigation measures like temperature checks, seen here in Nairobi’s Kibera slum. (YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images)

If you are trying to avoid a serious Covid-19 infection, you don’t want to be living in a developing country. Low-income parts of the world are scrambling to affordably purchase and find donations of the life-saving mRNA vaccines of the kind manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech. That leaves most of the African continent far behind much of the international community in its vaccination rate.

Out of the more than 50 countries in Africa, only five are expected to meet the World Health Organization’s Covid vaccine target of fully inoculating 40 percent of its people by the end of the year, the group said last month. In contrast, G20 countries have received 15 times the number of doses per capita than countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (minus South Africa, which is part of the G20). As I wrote last month, the U.S. is hoarding hundreds of millions of vaccine doses, many past their point of expiration.

One obvious solution to the problem is for African countries to start manufacturing their own mRNA vaccines. But it’s not that simple — even though their predicament is, simply, a consequence of corporate greed of the oldest kind.