Ranking member on Parliament’s Health Committee, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, has stated that Ghana will struggle to bring the rising Covid-19 cases under control “unless we get our vaccine strategy right.
“As I stand here, as a ranking member on the Parliamentary Select Committee on health, if you ask me when we are going to roll out the next vaccination plan, the answer is, I don’t know,” he stated.
Briefing the media in Parliament House on Tuesday, he described as scary, the recent increase in Covid-19 cases.
He said, “if you look at the data between 4th and 12th of July. On the 4th of July, it was around 1,573 and on the 12 of July, it was around 2,247 confirmed cases.
“The experts say that the only possible way we can have the effect of Covid-19 reduced is when we do mass vaccination. As I speak to you now, we had about one year to prepare to procure and deploy vaccines. The plan of the government was to deploy not less than 7.9 million doses of vaccines and as I speak to you we have vaccinated around 1 million people.”
Mr Akandoh further added that the Akufo-Addo government has stopped implementing measures that would prevent the spread of the disease, hence the need for the Ghanaians to take their destinies into their own hands by adhering to the Covid-19 safety protocols.
“I will take this opportunity to advise the public to take their own destinies into their own hands because what we are seeing is more or less like a third wave and therefore let us take the covid-19 protocols very seriously and adhere to them because there is no serious plan in place for now.
“The worst of it is that we have stopped testing. Now, if you have a positive case, it takes you the person, to go and test. There is no government plan for testing. Now laboratories are charging between GH360 to GH600. Now government facilities have run out of reagents to even do testing,” Mr Akandoh stressed,
The Juaboso MP called on the government to take urgent action to ensure the vaccination of citizens to reduce the rising cases of Covid-19.