Ghana on Wednesday, February 24, received 600,000 AstraZeneca/Oxford doses of Covid-19 vaccine, becoming the first African country to benefit from the Covax framework.

Covax is a global initiative that aims at accelerating fair and equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines for every country.

The doses are expected to help the West African country to further contain the pandemic that has been so far confirmed in more than 80,700 people and claimed over 580 lives in the country.

"We are pleased that Ghana has become the first country to receive the COVID-19 vaccines from the COVAX Facility. We congratulate the Government of Ghana … for its relentless efforts to protect the population,” reads a joint statement by WHO and UNICEF Representatives in Ghana.

"The shipments also represent the beginning of what should be the largest vaccine procurement and supply operation in history. This is an unprecedented global effort to make sure all citizens have access to vaccines,” it adds.

Covax published its first interim distribution forecast for the vaccines, providing information on the projected early availability of doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in Q1 of 2021, and the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine candidate in the first half of 2021 to the facility participants, among which is Rwanda. 

In the forecast, Rwanda has been allocated 996,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, and 102,960 of the Pfizer one.