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Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, Minister of Information designate
Source: GNA
Some government officials will publicly take doses of COVID-19 vaccines ahead of the mass vaccination exercise to help demystify public apprehension about vaccines.
The Ghana Health Service (GHS) will begin a mass vaccination exercise with COVID-19 vaccines for selected segments of the population next month.
Vaccines will first be administered to health workers, frontline security personnel, people with known underlying health conditions, over 60 elderly people, and frontline members of the executive, the legislature and justice.
The Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) has so far approved AstraZeneca vaccines from India and Sputnik-V vaccines from Russia for mass vaccination in Ghana from March through October.
However, some social media platforms are full of videos and photographs of people, who have allegedly taken COVID-19 vaccines in other jurisdictions, experiencing side effects, such as crooked mouth and nose, which created the fear and panic among part of the Ghanaian population. .
It is with this in mind, said Mr. Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, Minister-designate for information, on Friday during a public engagement on the COVID-19 vaccination deployment plan in Accra, that some members of the government, including himself, would volunteer. take COVID-19 vaccine shots publicly to debunk negative perception.
He said the Ghana Local Service (GLS), the Ministry of Health (MOH), the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) and the Department of Information Services (ISD) of Ghana would support the ” stakeholder engagement and sustained awareness campaigns. , to inform the public about the next vaccination exercise.
Mr. Oppong Nkrumah said health staff from GHS, ISD and NCCE will visit markets, truck parks, churches, mosques and other public places, with vans to educate the public, explain and answer questions about the immunization exercise.
The minister-designate urged the mass media to continue working with the government to educate the public about the immunization program and to advocate strict adherence to COVID-19 safety and prevention protocols.
Dr Kwame Amponsa-Achiano, program director, Expanded Program on Immunization, Ghana Health Service, said the COVID-19 vaccines the country will soon be administering have been clinically tested and found to be safe and efficient.
He said it would be administered in three phases, with each person taking two doses.
It is estimated that 20 million Ghanaians would be vaccinated at a cost of over $ 50 million and that it would cost the government $ 2.60 per person.
He said the GHS had trained more than 12,500 vaccinators, 2,000 supervisors and 37,413 volunteers to administer vaccines in the 260 metropolitan, city and district assemblies.
The vaccines would be stored at temperatures between two and eight degrees Celsius.
Dr Amponsa-Achiano said the country had a robust immunization program with coverage of over 95 percent, which had stood the test of time.
Ghana’s COVID-19 vaccine immunization regime is supported by the COVAX Facility, the African Medicine Platform, the African Union and civil society organizations in the pharmaceutical service.
Dr Amponsa-Achiano announced that the country would initially take delivery of more than 350,000 COVID-19 vaccines in a few weeks to allow the national exercise to begin.
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