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By Emma Farge, Stephanie Nebehay and Kate Kelland
GENEVA/LONDON, March 2 (Reuters) - The COVAX vaccine-sharing
programme said on Tuesday it will deliver 237 million doses of
AstraZeneca's COVID-19 shot to 142 countries by the end
of May as it steps up the global roll-out of its vaccine
supplies.
The timeline for the delivery of doses, made by AstraZeneca
and by India's Serum Institute, will be split into separate
two-month schedules, COVAX said in a statement, with the first
in February-March and the second in April-May.
"These timelines are dependent on a variety of factors
including national regulatory requirements, availability of
supply, and fulfillment of other criteria such as validated
national deployment and vaccination plans," the statement said.
COVAX is the programme backed by the World Health
Organization and GAVI vaccine alliance to provide vaccines for
poor and middle-income countries. It began its roll-out last
week with the first deliveries of shots to Ghana and Ivory
Coast.
"It can't be overemphasized enough that we are undertaking
the largest and most complex vaccine rollout in history," Seth
Berkley, GAVI chief executive officer, told a news conference.
"We are just starting, but we should see more and more
countries being served in coming weeks and months including
those at all income levels and across the world," he said.
Hailing the campaign as an "unprecedented partnership", WHO
Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Angola,
Cambodia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria could also
expect deliveries of COVAX-supplied vaccines on Tuesday.
"This is an unprecedented partnership that will not only
change the course of the pandemic but also change the way the
world responds to future health emergencies," Tedros said.
Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo told the same briefing
that his West African country, which this week began its
inoculation campaign with COVAX doses, aimed to vaccinate 20
million people by the end of 2021.
The COVAX statement said that as well as the first round of
allocations of the AstraZeneca vaccine, some 1.2 million doses
of the Pfizer-BioNTech shot were also
anticipated for delivery in the first quarter of 2021.
COVAX hoped to finalise a deal with Novavax for 1.1
billion doses in coming weeks, Berkley said.
(Reporting by Emma Farge and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva and
Kate Kelland in London
Editing by Mark Heinrich and Jonathan Oatis)
