The Director-General of Ghana Health Services, Dr Kuma Aboagye, has warned that continuous over-reliance on free vaccines from donors will not help Ghana get ready access to enough vaccines to meet the target of vaccinating 20 million people with the Covid-19 vaccine.
He was speaking on the Good Evening Ghana show on Metro TV on 10th August 2021.
He said the donor countries do not have enough vaccines and have not finished vaccinating their countries to have enough to give to African countries.
He shared efforts being made by Africa Union to procure about 400 million doses of Johnson and Johnson vaccines but these quantities will not be readily available soon enough to help meet the national target.
He shared the readiness level of the country to store any of the vaccines due to the upscaling of cold chain infrastructure and the ability to vaccinate up to six million people in four days should there be enough vaccines.
At a time when all the other continents are averaging between 30-50% vaccination rates of their population, Africa has vaccinated only 3.9% of the population.
This is because Africa was over-reliant on the COVAX programme through which GAVI and its donor partners would have made free donations available to Africa. Ghana was given 640,000 Astra Zeneca doses from this programme.
Countries like Malta, Saudi Arabia, Argentina and Brazil are in the top 20 league of countries with the highest vaccination rate because they looked beyond the conventional route to start vaccinating with the World Health Organisation (WHO) approved Chinese and Sputnik vaccines supplied through direct government to government and augmented by credible accredited third party sources.
In Africa, Morocco, Tunisia and other North African countries are doing the same and currently having over 35% average vaccination rates for the region.
Unfortunately, Ghana lies 16th on the league table with a vaccination rate of 2.8%.
The WHO, Centre for Disease Control and Ghana Medical Association have all warned about the urgent need for vaccination for more people to survive the ongoing 3rd wave being caused by the more deadly delta variant of the Covid-19 virus.