Geneva, Switzerland - The World Health Organization (WHO) will miss its target to vaccinate 40% of the population against the coronavirus in every country by the end of the year, with the shortfalls especially serious in Africa.

Of the WHO's 194 member countries, about half of them will not meet the goal. In about 40 countries, not even 10% of the population had been vaccinated.

The WHO has pinned much of the blame on vaccine hoarding, particularly among a handful of wealthy Western countries which are already administering booster jabs.

Worldwide, more than 8.6 billion vaccine doses had been administered by Tuesday, but mostly in high-income countries that had the resources to secure their own contracts with vaccine manufacturers.

Dozens of countries are dependent on supplies from COVAX, the UN-backed vaccine-sharing program intended to get shots in the arms of people in lower-income countries.

Prosperous countries have been slammed for not doing enough to support global vaccine equity through COVAX. Vaccine shipments via the scheme have picked up in recent weeks, however. By the last week of December, COVAX had delivered 722 million doses.

The WHO says that while in the US, about 151 vaccine doses per 100 inhabitants have been administered, in Madagascar it's under 2.7 and in the Democratic Republic of Congo as few as 0.32. In most African countries, the number is at most in the low two-digit range.

The pharma industry is convinced that it is not a lack of doses that is responsible for the imbalance.

According to estimates by the pharmaceutical association IFPMA, about 1.4 billion vaccine doses were manufactured in December alone.

Instead, it blames everything on vaccine skepticism and distribution issues. This argument has also been used to justify the virulent opposition to lifting intellectual property rules on vaccines, which critics have slammed as putting profits over people.

The WHO also believes that countries would be ready for mass vaccination campaigns if they had access to doses in an organized and timely fashion.

Many rich countries have collectively pledged more than a billion doses as donations. However, according to the WHO, deliveries often take a long time to materialize. Some of the jabs also have only a few weeks left until the expiry date, which makes distribution in poorer countries especially complicated.