In March, as the wealthy U.K. led the world in vaccination rates and almost half its people had received a shot, the organization meant to ensure fair global access to COVID-19 vaccines allotted the country over half a million doses from its supplies.
By contrast, Botswana — which hadn't even started its vaccination drive — was assigned 20,000 doses from the same batch of millions of Pfizer mRNA vaccines, according to publicly available documents detailing COVAX's allocations.
Other poorer nations, with fledgling vaccination drives at best, also received fewer shots than the U.K.. Rwanda and Togo were each allotted about 100,000 doses, and Libya nearly 55,000.