• Experts agree several Covid-19 vaccine candidates could be approved next month or early January.
• Health CS Mutahi Kagwe said Kenya has not made any prior agreements with manufacturers and was waiting on the Covax facility.
Image: MATHEWS NDANYI
All health workers in Kenya can expect to receive a Covid-19 vaccine early next year.
Gavi says it has now secured funds to buy vaccines for nearly 20 per cent of the country’s population.
Health workers, the elderly and those in poor health will be the first to be vaccinated.
Experts agree several vaccine candidates could be approved next month or early January.
The Geneva-based alliance says it has raised more than Sh200 billion ($2 billion) to guarantee at least one billion doses of vaccines for 92 developing countries, including Kenya.
The announcement is a major relief for Kenya, which has lost at least 30 healthcare workers to the disease, the Ministry of Health has said.
“This funding will allow Covax AMC to reserve and access one billion doses for AMC-eligible economies, with at least $5 billion needed in 2021 to procure doses as they come through the portfolio,” the organisation said in a statement.
Covax AMC is a global initiative - led by Gavi, WHO and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations - to ensure Covid-19 vaccines are available to both high-and low-income countries.
Recently, Nairobi-based Oxfam reported that wealthy nations representing just 13 per cent of the world’s population had already bought 51 per cent of the promised doses of leading Covid-19 vaccine candidates.
“Even in the extremely unlikely event that all five [leading] vaccines succeed, nearly two thirds (61 per cent) of the world’s population will not have a vaccine until at least 2022,” Oxfam said.
Health CS Mutahi Kagwe said Kenya has not made any prior agreements with manufacturers and was waiting on the Covax facility.
“We are part of the global umbrella facility for the Covid vaccines through a collaboration with Gavi and will continue to engage through this platform until an effective vaccine is discovered and approved by the global and local regulators for rollout,” he said.
Gavi has so far identified at least nine candidates to be financed through the initiative.
These are produced by AstraZeneca/University of Oxford (Phase III), USA's Inovio (phase II), Novavax (Phase II), Moderna (Phase III) and France's Institut Pasteur (preclinical).
Others are CureVac of Germany (Phase I), University of Queensland, Australia (Phase I), University of Hong Kong (Preclinical) and Clover Biopharmaceuticals, China (Phase I).
The World Health Organization says more than 150 Covid-19 vaccine candidates from various pharmaceutical companies are presently in development, with around 44 in clinical trials and 11 undergoing late-stage testing.
According to various analyses, the front runners include the vaccine candidates by Pfizer and BioNTech, US drugmaker Moderna Inc, AstraZeneca-Oxford, Russia’s Sputnik and the Johnson and Johnson vaccine.
Gavi CEO Seth Berkley said the $2 billion raised is still not enough.
“We urgently need to raise at least an additional $5 billion by the end of 2021 to ensure equitable distribution of these vaccines to those who need them,” he said in a statement.
In August the alliance said they will ensure at least 20 per cent of each country's population is vaccinated with the first vaccine that is released.
"Once a vaccine has been approved by regulatory agencies and/or prequalified by the WHO, the Covax Facility will then purchase these vaccines with a goal to try and initially provide doses for an average of 20 per cent of each country’s population," the Gavi board said.
(Edited by V. Graham)