Imperative of the African Union Intervention in COVID-19 Vaccine Apartheid

When the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic broke out in late 2019, there was a total lockdown and restriction of people in early 2020 by most governments worldwide in order to curb the transmission of the virus. To curtail and contain the spread of the virus and infections, leading pharmaceutical companies of the world, under the auspices of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and particularly Africa, African Union Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, actively participated in various stages of vaccines research and development to boost immunity and to combat the spread of the deadly virus. Within a year, there was a breakthrough whereby different brands of COVID-19 vaccines were developed and ready to be administered. Notably, some African countries participated in some developmental stages of the vaccines. However, when the vaccines were certified for distribution and usage, there were obvious inequalities and discrimination in the distribution. For instance, while the developed countries had easy access to vaccines to vaccinate their people, developing countries, particularly those in Africa, were left unattended, resulting in vaccine apartheid. Vaccine apartheid indicated massive inequality and neglect of African countries, whose citizens were largely unprotected from the virus as many were unvaccinated. Methodologically, using the literature review approach, this paper looked at the vaccine apartheid phenomenon amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the instruments of the African Union (AU) that were easily deployable to develop and manufacture vaccines generally, and how the AU should commence the upscale of its technology.