By Nathaniel Nartey
The Ghana Medical Association, GMA, has called on the Government to focus on the equitable distribution of vaccines across the country to ensure each person is fully vaccinated before considering a third dose.
This follows suggestions that fully vaccinated people be allowed to receive booster jabs as is being done elsewhere, with Ghana experiencing a 4th wave of Covid-19 infections from the Omicron variant.
General Secretary of the GMA, Dr. Titus Beyuo explained that most of the countries administering the third jab to their citizens have fully vaccinated the majority of the population, which is not the case in Ghana.
He told GBC’s Nathaniel Nartey that due to the high rate of vaccine hesitancy in the country, some of the vaccines in stock are likely to expire due to their short lifespan.
”We have to follow science and the epidemiology of this disease. In countries like Israel, they are even going for the 4th dose. Netherlands and Germany are also giving booster jabs but also the rate of vaccine intake is high in these countries, some 80% others even 90% of their population is already vaccinated. Our situation is peculiar where a large chunk of the population is still unvaccinated and we have vaccine supply issues…..I think that it is more better and equitable to ensure that at least everybody get one or the two doses before we start giving out the 3rd dose……some vaccines have expired but I cannot say its alot. The vaccines have a short lifespan.”
“The Ministry of Health can decide to allow fully vaccinated people to get a third jab to prevent the vaccines from going to waste.”
”The caveat is that with the advent of vaccine hesitancy and vaccines having a shorter lifespan, it may be okay to give those who are desirous of a 3rd dose vaccines with shorter expiry duration so that instead of these jabs going waste those who desire to take them would have them,” according to Titus Beyuo.
