Lack of Supply or Demand? What we can learn from South Africa’s experience
The Global Accountability Platform (COVID GAP) blog series. December 3, 2021 By Beth Boyer and Andrea Taylor South Africa and a handful of other African nations recently asked vaccine makers to hold off on shipping more COVID-19 vaccines for the time being. Leaders of wealthy countries, accused of hoarding vaccine doses, are using this to make the case that vaccine hesitancy rather than supply is to blame for low vaccination coverage across sub-Saharan Africa. This comes amid the emergence of the Omicron variant, first identified by South Africa’s genome sequencing experts, which has reignited calls to urgently address the inequitable distribution of vaccines. The demand-not-supply framing overlooks the more complicated reality of vaccination campaigns for countries across Africa. In fact, hesitancy is only part of the problem. According to a survey conducted earlier this year by the…









