On December 8, 2020, the start of vaccination against Covid-19 in the UK marked the beginning of a worldwide campaign to contain the coronavirus pandemic. In Brazil, immunization would start later, on January 17, despite the inaction of President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration.
Today, half of the world’s population has received at least one dose of the vaccine. But, while rich and emerging countries already apply booster doses, poorer nations register low immunization rates.
Inequality is one of the main problems of the campaign, also affected by controversies about side effects, which are rare, and by protests against mandatory vaccination in some countries.
Below, check out a balance of this first year of vaccination in the world.
More than half of the vaccinated population
The British were the first to start the campaign on a large scale, although countries like Russia and China had already started to vaccinate to a limited extent.
The UK primarily used the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, one of 20 currently in application, all developed in record time as the new coronavirus was first detected in China in late 2019.
Several countries began vaccinating their citizens in the same month, most with the messenger RNA vaccine from the Pfizer/BioNTech laboratory: United States, Canada and UAE on December 14; Saudi Arabia on the 17th; Israel on the 19th; the European Union on the 27th.
A year later, more than half of the world population (55%) received at least one dose, that is, more than 4.3 billion people. And at least 44% (3.4 billion) are with the complete vaccination schedule, according to the AFP balance based on official data from the countries.
More than 8.1 billion doses have been applied worldwide. In addition to AstraZeneca and Pfizer, the other most used vaccines are those developed by the American laboratories Johnson & Johnson and Moderna, the Chinese Sinopharm and Sinovac and the Russian Sputnik V.
poor countries backwards
Although at least since June 2021 almost all countries have been applying vaccines, the pace is slow in most of the poorest, when it is not interrupted by lack of doses.
The Covax Facility consortium, led by the World Health Organization (WHO) to ensure equal access to vaccines, delivered the first shipment in late February in Ghana.
But, rivaling countries willing to pay high prices for the drugs, it delivered just 591 million doses to 144 countries or territories, below the 2 billion target set for 2021.
In low-income countries (according to the World Bank classification), only nine doses were administered for every 100 inhabitants. The world average is 104 for every 100 inhabitants. In high-income countries, it reaches 149 per 100.
Africa is the least protected continent, with 18 doses for every 100 inhabitants. Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo are the least vaccinated countries, with 0.007% and 0.06% of the population respectively.
Two countries haven’t even started vaccination yet: Eritrea and North Korea.
UAE in first position
Among the 50 most vaccinated countries, 39 are in the high-income group, with the United Arab Emirates in the lead, with more than 89% of the population immunized.
Then come Portugal (87%), Singapore (86%), Qatar (85%), Chile and Malta (84%), Cuba (81%), South Korea and Cambodia (80%), Spain and Seychelles (79 %) and Malaysia (78%).
Despite the start with an excellent pace of vaccination thanks to doses delivered quickly, after 12 months countries like the United Kingdom (68%), Israel (67%) or the United States (60%) are not among the most immunized.
Booster doses and vaccines for minors
High-income countries are also among those that have started to administer booster doses. The group includes almost every country in Europe, North America and the Gulf.
Most of them also apply doses to teenagers (12-17 years old) and some, like the United States, Canada, Israel, Cuba, Emirates, Cambodia or Venezuela, to children from five or six years old.
In the European Union, Austria anticipated the bloc’s drug agency in mid-November, which only approved at the end of the month the application of Pfizer’s vaccine to children aged five years and over.
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