Ghana’s COVID-19 vaccination unimpressive – GHS

The Ghana Health Service (GHS) says the COVID-19 vaccination in Ghana is not very impressive as there is low patronage of the programme even though there are enough vaccines available.

It said the pace at which Ghanaians are patronising the free vaccination exercise is very low, especially as the government had planned to vaccinate a total of 20 million people before the end of the year.

As of now, [November 21] only about five million people have so far received at least a single jab.

Out of the number, about 1.2million are fully vaccinated.

In a radio interview with Accra based Citi FM, the manager of the expanded vaccination programme on immunisation, Dr Kwame Amponsah Achiano said many Ghanaians are skeptical about getting vaccinated due to “misinformation”.

“As at 21st [November], we had almost five million doses given out. What it means is that some have received one dose, others have two doses. If you count the doses as individual doses then we are looking at 4.7, almost 4.8 [million].”

“How many have received a jab or two jabs, for which reason we will say they are fully vaccinated, 1.2 million. So within the 4.6million, you have 1.2million.

“If you look at our track record in the recent past, before COVID or even within the context of COVID, we did quite a number of campaigns comparable to any other campaign like the COVID vaccination campaign, we did yellow fever and within a space of 10 days, we had done more than six million doses”.

“That is why we think that the capacity is there but of course, because there are several factors militating against the delivery of the deployments, we are  not getting the maximum output as we’d have wished. In other words, we have the capacity to deploy lets say two million in a week but because of fear and all the other things about misinformation…, we are not at our optimum, that is why we are unhappy,” he said.

Source: graphicsonline