Health Minister, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu has given the assurance that despite the challenges in procuring vaccines as part of government’s expanded programme on immunization against the coronavirus pandemic, government is committed to vaccinating the 20 million Ghanaians it has targeted.
He said this when he was addressing journalists at a press briefing in Accra on Wednesday June 16, 2021. According to him, the slow progress in the country’s vaccination exercise is as a result of the limited availability of vaccines particularly from India as scheduled vaccine deliveries have not materialized.
“The supply side of the vaccines has been a little bit murky. This is because we got the news that we are not going to get vaccines as has been scheduled from India through the COVAX window. This has slowed our vaccination drive a bit,” he said.
Ghana has been administering doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine since March 1st, when Phase 1 of the immunization drive began. Though the country has taken delivery of a further 350,000 Astrazeneca vaccines, the progress of the vaccination exercise has hit a slack.
The relatively slow pace of progress is largely attributable to the limited availability of vaccines as deliveries expected in March and April did not happen forcing managers of the COVID-19 programme to turn to Russia’s Sputnik V vaccines.
However, procurement of Sputnik V vaccines from Russia has been a subject of serious controversy. The involvement of middlemen in the procurement process has raised concerns that the vaccines were overpriced. Explaining the rationale behind engaging middlemen the Minister said that government had run out of bilateral options.
“Astrazeneca had closed its borders and there was no way any vaccine was going to be shipped from India so the only option to engage was Sputnik. The first option was to try to do bilateral engagement but it yielded no significant result. We have to write to the Foreign Minister, Health Minister and Trade Minister of Russia trying to see how best they can facilitate us to do bilateral engagement so we could buy Sputnik from the source. All these did not yield significant result. We therefore had no other options than to engage middlemen to see how best we can get the vaccines,” he added.
Source: MOI (PR Unit)
