The African continent may miss the goal of vaccinating 70% of the population, 1.3 billion people against covid-19 by the second half of 2024, the World Health Organization (WHO) said.

News sources report that health officials in South Africa, who announced the new variant, say that initial data indicate that it causes less severe illness and shorter, less intensive hospital stays.

Some wealthier countries, motivated by the emergence of this new variant, have decided to allow booster doses of the vaccine as a response. In contrast, less than 8% of the African population received both doses of the covid-19 vaccine.

"We'll never get out of this unless we work together as one world," said the President of South Africa's Medical Colleges, Flavia Senkubuge, during the WHO briefing," quoted by the Lusa news agency.

Data indicate that only 20 out of 54 African countries have fully vaccinated at least 10% of their population against covid-19, and 10 countries have fully vaccinated less than 2% of their population.

The African continent received about 434 million doses of vaccine, and about 910,000 of them expired in 20 countries, representing less than a quarter of 1%, Moeti explained.

The main challenge in Africa remains access to vaccine supplies, Moeti concluded.

Current data from Agence France-Presse indicate that covid-19 has caused at least 5,304,397 deaths worldwide, among more than 269 million infections with the new coronavirus recorded since the pandemic began

A new variant, Omicron, has been detected in southern Africa, but since the South African health authorities sounded the alarm on November 24, infections have been reported in at least 57 countries on all continents.