Over fifty nations – several of which are in Africa – missed the target of the World Health Organization (WHO) to vaccinate ten percent of their residents by last month, a distressing shortfall one agency official blamed on the lack of discrimination between rich and poor. On Tuesday, the WHO said that the vaccination rates are still lagging less than ten percent in fifty-six countries, including nations such as Haiti, Uganda, Nigeria, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia.

Coronavirus technical lead, Maria Van Kerkhove, called this missed target “heartbreaking” and beyond words in a Tuesday Q&A session. Kerkhove said that COVID vaccine inequity is fueling the deadly outbreak, arguing the global death toll and infection rate of coronavirus slid in last some weeks – are gratuitously high because vaccine supplies across the world have not distributed equally.

“If we had used the more than 6 billion vaccines that have been administered today differently, we would be in a very, very different situation right now,” Kerkhove said, adding the vaccine inequity is “heartbreaking” and “frustrating.”

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The World Health Organization epidemiologist also criticized some authorities for withdrawing their physical distancing and face-mask wearing rules early. Unvaccinated individuals account for an inconsistent share of new virus deaths in nations with reliable statistics, boosting evidence the vaccines are effective at staving off death. Earlier Tuesday, the United States Department of Health & Human Services credited vaccines for preventing thirty-nine thousand deaths among American seniors from January to May.

How many people Received partial vaccination globally?

According to Our World In Data, around 3.6 billion people globally are at least partially vaccinated against coronavirus, equaling over forty-five percent of the population of Earth. Vaccine coverage across the world varies dramatically. The vaccination efforts of Europe began slowly, but some 67.4 percent of the residents European Union (EU) now received at least one shot of the vaccine, over three points ahead of the U.S., with the vaccination rate of Portugal exceed eighty-seven percent.

Over seven in ten residents received vaccination in nations such as Singapore (79.7%), South Korea (77.5%), China (76.2%), Malaysia (73.1%), Japan (72.1%), and the United Kingdom (71.8%). On the other side, India’s 47.5% vaccination rate is a little bit beyond the international average. But only 6.9% of residents in Africa received vaccination shots, and rates lag well less than five percent in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

The WHO Urged wealthiest Countries to Donate COVID-19 Vaccine

International health officials, including the WHO, spent many months urging wealthier countries to share coronavirus vaccines with poorer and low-income nations. However, this strategy faced variable degrees of success. In addition, the World Health Organization suggested a pause on booster doses until 2022 last month. Instead, it argued that additional vaccine shots should go to people globally who still do not receive their initial dose. Still, nations such as the United Kingdom, Israel, and the United States go ahead with plans to offer third (booster) dose fully vaccinated people.

FDA and CDC in the United States also approved Pfizer’s vaccine for children twelve and older in May, and less than a week later, the WHO encouraged the wealthiest countries to delay plans to give vaccination shots to kids against COVID-19 until more of the high-risk population globally is immune. Nations such as the United States also donated hundreds of millions of vaccine shots and billions of dollars to COVAX.

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