The Ghana Health Service (GHS) will later today [Monday, August 23, 2021], meet with manufacturers of the Pfizer vaccines to finalize steps for the delivery of some consignments to augment Ghana’s inoculation drive.
The government had earlier disclosed that about 1.2 million Pfizer vaccines are expected to arrive in the coming days, and some cold chain storage facilities have been procured to help in its storage.
But in an interview with Citi News, the Programmes Manager for the Extended Programme on Immunization at the Ghana Health Service, Dr Kwame Amponsa-Achiano, disclosed that the Service has been contacted on more conditions to be met before the vaccines can be delivered.
“We have been given emergency use approval and the other conditions are from the manufacturer and not from within. They have given us some conditions and we are doing them. So we are gradually preparing. We actually anticipated that we were going to get the Pfizer last month, but it turned out that information was coming from COVAX but the manufacturers had their own conditions.”
Meanwhile, the Service will later this week begin deploying the 249,000 Astrazeneca vaccines received from the UK government to clear the backlog of persons yet to receive their second doses.
“We are getting approximately 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccines which is part of the consignment that is coming. As for our backlog, it will be cleared.”
The Presidential Advisor on Health, Dr Anthony Nsiah-Asare, has already indicated that Ghana will soon receive the first consignment of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines through the COVAX initiative.
Ghana just finished making use of 177,600 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccines last week.
Before the latest round of vaccinations with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, only 405,971 had received both doses of the AstraZeneca vaccines whilst 865,422 had received one dose. Ghana is currently contending with 6,647 active COVID-19 cases from 114,584 since the pandemic began.
Source: Ernest Arhinful and Hanson Aggyemang
