The head of the immunization and vaccine development program at the World Health Organization (WHO) regional directorate in Africa, Richard Mihigo, acknowledges that the continent with the largest number of unimmunized people receives vaccines with a short shelf life, and fewer in number than in the United States and Europe.

According to Mihigo, African countries should not be blamed for incinerating the vaccines because they "were victims" when they received the immunizers with expired expiration dates.

"Yes, Africa destroyed vaccines, but only because they were sent with dates close to the expiration date, and therefore the countries that were, in this case, the victims, should not be blamed," he said.

On the other hand, the WHO official warned that if Africa continues to receive too few vaccines at the same rate, it will be difficult to reach the goal of immunizing 40% of the population by the end of next year, predicting that this may not happen until 2023.

"The question is how we can get the vaccines to people," which involves fighting many "rumors and misinformation" that leads some citizens to refuse vaccination.

Some proposals for dealing with the vaccine shortage on the African continent is to build state-of-the-art laboratories so that there is no brain drain, advanced by the secretary-general of the Alliance of African Research Universities and the African Economic Research Consortium, Ernest Aryeetey.

And UN/AIDS Director Winnie Byanyima suggested suspending intellectual property in pandemic scenarios, such as covid-19.

"[This] would allow countries to be able to manufacture their own vaccines," he explained.

The above entities were speaking yesterday during the virtual conference on "Vaccination in Africa: Research Capacity, Advocacy, Manufacturing and Distribution," as part of the first International Public Health Conference on the continent.