Uganda, April 27 -- On March 5, 2021, government officials led by the Minister of Health, Dr. Ruth Aceng, received the first batch of 864,000 doses of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine to contain a disease that had brought the world to its knees.

But about 14,000km away in the USA, the government had started administering the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine to its citizens three months earlier.

The production sites for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine are in Michigan, USA, and BioNTech's plants in Germany, which would take a maximum of 48 hours to fly to Entebbe.

But due to high demand at the time, the USA and other wealthy countries bought up supplies and only released vaccines to poor and developing countries months later.

As officials f...