The Ghana Health Service (GHS) says it has discarded about one million Covid-19 vaccines so far.
Speaking at a press briefing in Accra on Tuesday, Director-General of GHS, Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, disclosed that this will not affect the countty’s vaccination drive.
“There’s always vaccine wastage, either you discard, it breaks or storage is not optimum, so you discard them. But there’s a maximum, there’s a percentage of 10%. The proportion that we have so far discarded is 4.4% so we are way within the normal range of vaccine as acceptable and that comes rarely just about a million or so doses,” he said.
“But if you look at the fact that some of the vaccines arrive two or three months to expiry, it is expected that you will get some wastage along the things I talked about.”
Meanwhile, he has also lamented the lack of interest in the vaccination exercise by the public.
According to him, people have refused to take the vaccine although the country has enough vaccines.
He said currently, Ghana is recording relatively low cases of the virus, as the average new cases recorded daily and weekly are less than 5 and 20, respectively.
But the apathetic behaviour of the public may affect efforts to secure early herd immunity, he warned.
“There has been a significant decline in the number of cases reported at the airport for those few people who are tested. The land borders are open and a little over 14 million of our population have received at least a vaccine.
“But unfortunately, the vaccine uptake has reduced and that is so because of the low-risk perception,” he said.
By: Rainbowradioonline.com/Ghana
