Coronavirus live news: AstraZeneca expected to miss EU vaccine target; WHO reports 20% drop in global deaths | World news

Good morning, this is Archie Bland picking up the live blog from Helen Sullivan. (A groodle is what a goldendoodle is called in Australia, I have just learned.)

First to Ghana, where the World Health Organization’s global vaccine sharing scheme Covax delivered its first Covid-19 shots on Wednesday, as the race to get doses to the world’s poorest people and tame the pandemic accelerates.

A flight carrying 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine produced by the Serum Institute of India landed in the capital Accra, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (Unicef), said in a joint statement.

The shots will be used to kick-start a vaccination drive that will prioritise frontline health workers and others at high-risk, according to a plan presented by Ghanaian health officials on Friday.

“This is a momentous occasion, as the arrival of the Covid-19 vaccines into Ghana is critical in bringing the pandemic to an end,” Anne-Claire Dufay of Unicef Ghana, and WHO country representative, Francis Kasolo, said in a statement reported by Reuters.

“These 600,000 Covax vaccines are part of an initial tranche of deliveries … which represent part of the first wave of Covid vaccines headed to several low and middle-income countries,” they said.

The roll-out in Ghana is a milestone for the initiative that is trying to narrow a politically sensitive gap between the millions of people being vaccinated in wealthier countries and the comparatively few who have received shots in less-developed parts of the world.

It aims to deliver a total of 2.3bn doses by year-end, including 1.8bn to poorer countries at no cost to their governments, and to cover up to 20% of countries’ populations. But it will not be sufficient for nations to reach herd immunity and effectively contain the spread of the virus.

On Tuesday, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged wealthy nations to share vaccine doses with Covax, saying the goal of equitable distribution was “in jeopardy.”

“So far 210 million doses of vaccine have been administered globally but half of those are in just two countries,” Tedros said in Geneva. “More than 200 countries are yet to administer a single dose.”