Georgetown: Guyana on Monday received 42,120 doses of the Pfizer vaccine, the third shipment from the United States Government, through the COVAX facility.
Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony stated the significance of the donations in ensuring sufficient doses are available to the population.
“As you know, when we started our vaccination of persons here in Guyana, we had trouble getting vaccines, and we did not have enough for everybody but over the last couple of months we have been able to correct that situation thanks to the generous donation of countries that make up COVAX because without those donations, we would not have received these vaccines,” the minister said.
He said COVAX has been working for Guyana and other developing countries to help reduce the spread of the Covid -19 disease.
“COVAX has a mechanism that has really worked for developing countries. So, not only we have benefitted, but many countries across the world would have benefitted from these donations,” the minister said.
He said the biggest challenge currently being faced in Guyana is that while there are sufficient vaccines for everyone, there has still been some level of hesitancy of persons to take their jabs.
“I think we have to work more on that. There’s still some amount of hesitancy, there’s still myths out there, there’s still a lot of mis-information, and we have to work to dispel those and once we’re able to do that, I think we’ll be in a much better place,” he said.
Meanwhile, the U.S Ambassador to Guyana, Her Excellency, Sarah-Ann Lynch expressed how proud the U.S Government is to assist Guyana with the vaccines.
“I think this brings the total now up to more than 308,000 vaccines donated through the COVAX mechanism to Guyana and in addition, there has been another 143,000 Pfizer vaccines donated by the United States to Guyana and that donation was really a couple of months ago and really helped in getting the children back in schools so we’re very proud of that,” she said.
Minister Anthony also urged the public to get vaccinated against the virus, as it is constantly mutating.
He said scientific literature show there are approximately 50 mutations of the new variant, with 32 on the spike protein.
The new shipment of COVID-19 vaccines will strengthen Guyana’s National COVID-19 vaccination programme, which is open to persons ages 12-17.
To date, 40.5 per cent of the adolescent population has received a first dose of the Pfizer vaccine and 28.4 per cent of them have received both doses.
The adult population generally, on the other hand has seen 404,122 or 78.8 per cent of people receiving at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Some 283,505 people or 55.3 per cent of the adult population is fully inoculated.
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