With Africa struggling to secure sufficient vaccines to start countrywide inoculation programmes for its 1.3 billion people, the head of the international Gavi vaccine alliance said the surplus doses that richer countries had ordered ran into the hundreds of millions, Reuters reports.

Ramaphosa, who chairs the African Union and whose nation has recorded nearly half of the continent’s coronavirus deaths, said the world needed those who had hoarded doses to release them for other countries to use.

“The rich countries of the world went out and acquired large doses,” he told a virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum. “Some even acquired up to four times what their population needs ... to the exclusion of other countries.”

World Health Organisation Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last week described this unequal access as a “catastrophic moral failure”.

The African Union this month secured 270 million shots for the continent to supplement 600 million doses from the COVAX vaccine distribution scheme co-led by the WHO and Gavi.