I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Tuesday, September 28.

I don't know if this part of the UN General Assembly from last week broke through in many news stories. But they had what was

called a side summit. And at it, President Biden hosted a virtual gathering of leaders of other

countries and international nonprofit organizations, philanthropists, scientists, and said to deal with what he called this global

tragedy of COVID-19, we need to quote, go big, Biden's words. And he said the U.S. would buy another

500 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine to donate to countries who need them. That includes much of

the African continent where only 14 countries have hit the milestone

of vaccinating even 10% of their population, and only four countries are above 20% vaccinated.

That while the U.S. is starting a third round of Pfizer shots, as you know, for those the CDC has deemed most vulnerable, it's a serious disease.

So to talk about the global COVID picture, and especially the picture in Africa and what vaccine equity might mean,

I'm joined now by Dr. Richard Mejigo, the Immunization and Vaccines Development Program Coordinator at the

World Health Organization's Regional Office for Africa. He joins us now from Brazzaville, Congo.

Dr. Mahigo, hello from New York. Thank you for coming on WNYC.

Hello, good morning. Good afternoon. We are already in the afternoon here, Brian.

And I'm glad to be with you this morning.

Can you start by talking about the status of COVID-19 cases across Africa?

How many waves have you seen, for example?

We say second wave, third wave.

We're in the fourth wave, I guess, in the United States now.

Where are things there?

Well, we think the number of cases, unfortunately, are still increasing.

On the continent in total, we have around 1.1 million cases that have been so far are recorded with more than

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