The Presidential advisor on health, Dr. Anthony Nsiah Asare, has disclosed that, government has initiated steps aimed at procuring additional COVID-19 vaccine to help in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
Speaking in an interview, he explained that, this initiative is to help increase the quantity of vaccines allocated to Ghana by the GAVI Alliance, formerly the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation to help fight the viral disease.
Dr Nsiah also assured that, the first batch of vaccines the government has already procured may arrive earlier than planned.
“We are working around the clock to make sure that we get the vaccine in the country as quickly as possible… If you want to deploy vaccine, they have to be registered by the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA). Secondly, it should be pre-qualified by the WHO, and it should be affordable and accessible.
“So, we as a country are also working out that we also get our own, we procure on our own in addition to the one which will be coming.”
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Dr Asare further stated that, work is also underway to identify the groups that will require the vaccination when it arrives in the country.
“We are also working on people who will receive it first. Is it frontline workers? Is it people who are at risk and all that? … the government has also planned to procure some, because COVAD is giving us about 20 percent of the vaccines.”
He said this, in relation to the surge in COVID-19 cases over the past weeks and the issues associated with the safety measures and the procurement of the vaccine for the country.
Despite governments effort to procure immediately the vaccine into the country, which is anticipated to be in by March, there are also assumptions making rounds about the vaccine, which has seen a lot of people with the view that, the vaccine may be accompanied with side effects.
A virologist at the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research in Tropical Medicine (KCCR), Dr Augustina Sylvaken, in defence of this assumption recently explained that people can experience different reactions to COVID-19 vaccination as every other vaccination.
She explained that, every drug introduced into the human system could be detected as a foreign material by the body’s immune system which invokes a reaction.
“Everyone has different reactions to medicine. Some people get irritated or even develop diarrhoea after taking malaria drugs, some kids have no effects to injection whilst others develop some adverse effects.”
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, announced on Sunday January 17 in his address on the measures taken against the spread of the virus, stated that, Ghana has recorded the new variant of COVID-19 following recent genomic sequencing by scientists in the country.
The President disclosed that, the infected individuals, most of whom are international passengers who arrived at Kotoka International Airport, have since been isolated and at the same time, work has begun to establish the extent of spread of the new variant among the general population.
The President urged citizens to adhere to safety measures to help in fighting the fast spreading virus in the country.
