Rwanda to receive 500 million US vaccines this week

The United States of America (USA) will this week send the first batch of 500 million vaccines against COVID-19 to several countries, including Rwanda, which will receive nearly half a million doses.

According to the Associated Press (AP), the US will send 488,370 doses of Pfizer's vaccine to Rwanda, of which 188,370 are part of the US commitment to share 500 million doses to low-and-middle-income countries.

In a White House communication cited by the news agency, the doses are from the surplus of the country's reserves, which has already shared more than 110 million doses this summer.

The order with Pfizer will make at least 200 million doses available by the end of the year to be donated, with a further 300 million doses to be delivered in the first half of next year.

The announcement comes as the US prepares to recommend a third dose of the vaccine for all ages, approximately eight months after the first dose, to increase protection against the new coronavirus, the AP says.

Africa has recorded a further 802 deaths associated with COVID-19 and 27,705 new infections in 24 hours, now totaling 183,763 deaths and 7,314,632 cases since the start of the pandemic, according to the most recent official data for the region.

According to the bulletin of the African Union Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), southern Africa remains the most affected region, with 3,493,867 infected and 96,573 deaths associated with COVID-19.

COVID-19 has caused at least 4,370,427 deaths worldwide, among more than 207.84 million infections by the new coronavirus registered since the start of the pandemic, according to the latest report by the agency France Presse.

The respiratory disease is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, detected at the end of 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China, and currently with variants identified in countries such as the United Kingdom, India, South Africa, Brazil, and Peru.