World's poor nations lag behind in COVID-19 vaccinations: report

NEW YORK - About a year since mostly wealthy nations began rolling out coronavirus vaccines, more than half of the world population has been fully vaccinated, but the global rollout remains uneven, with poor countries reporting much lower vaccination rates than rich countries, reported The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Friday.

"Public health experts have been warning that vaccine inequity is helping prolong the pandemic, as the focus of those seeking to speed up global vaccine coverage begins to shift from filling a shortfall of vaccine supply to distributing the doses and persuading people to get them," said the report.

Nearly 54 percent of the world population is fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, the newspaper quoted Our World in Data, an information partnership between the University of Oxford and the Global Change Data Lab charity, as saying.

Nearly 62 percent have received at least one vaccine dose. Yet, less than 11 percent of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose. That number jumps to about 55 percent for lower-middle-income countries and nearly 80 percent for both upper-middle-income and high-income nations, according to Our World in Data.

"The United States, countries of the European Union and others were criticized for buying up most of the early global supply of coronavirus vaccines," added the report.