Vaccine Equity

The COVID-19 vaccination campaign has been going on for over a year and as of beginning of March 2022 63.4% of the world population has received at least one dose.

Vaccination rates are however very inequal across the various regions, with ESAR, WCAR and MENA to a lesser extent experiencing a far lower coverage.

Vaccination rate by country

These discrepancies in terms of coverage are reflected in supplies – WCAR, ESAR and MENA have received far less  doses per capita than the other regions.

Especially considering that only around 60% of the supplied doses seem to actually be administered in ESAR and 45% in WCAR.

Caveat: supply and administration are based on 2 different datasets and there might be a slight time lag

For additional insights on vaccine supply and administered doses in the Africa region please click here, and for the Middle East and North African region, here.

Vaccine supply per country

Note: Urugay’s data under reviewing as supply might be incorrect

Willingness to vaccinate against COVID-19 has increased in most countries since the introduction of vaccination. Since the end of 2021, willingness to be vaccinated has remained relatively stable in the Asia-Pacific, Americas and MENA regions. However, we are seeing a recent decline, particularly in the ESA region, where there has been a significant drop since December 2021, and in Europe since January 2022. The willingness to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in the West and Central Africa region remains lower.

It is interesting to notice that all regions display a simila behaviour, although with a delay: an initial decrease followed by an increase, which happens around the time when the vaccine got rolled out in each region.

Vaccine willingness seems to be a bit lower in Africa but still much higher than the vaccination rate.

Especially as there seems to be a positive correlation between time since vaccine rollout and vaccine willingness increase

Vaccine willingness by country

Since COVID-19 vaccine, concern on cost related to vaccine (purchase, care, transport, …) has been reduced strongly in all regions. If globally, the cost is not the major concern such as fear of side-effect or confidency, it’s still more frequent in Africa, MENA and Asia regions than Europe and Americas.

Persons interested in exploring country-level data further can use the RCCE COVID-19 Country Dashboard https://www.rcce-collective.net/data/behavioural-indicators/country-profile/

• Vaccine supply: https://www.unicef.org/supply/covid-19-vaccine-market-dashboard
• Vaccine administration: https://github.com/owid/covid-19-data/tree/master/public/data
• Vaccine willingness and Cost concerns: various sources detailed in https://www.rcce-collective.net/data/behavioural-indicators/

• UNDP – Global Dashboard for Vaccine Equity: https://data.undp.org/vaccine-equity/

Publication: 14th March 2022