The Special Advisor on Health at the Presidency, Dr. Anthony Nsiah Asare, has justified the government’s seeming inability to roll out a specific vaccination strategy amid the rising cases of COVID-19.
Concerns have been raised over the government’s failure to vary its vaccination strategy in the wake of a spike in COVID-19 cases in the country.
The Ranking Member on Parliament’s Health Committee, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, urged the government to alter its vaccination strategy to halt the recent surge in positive cases.
According to him, the government’s unfocused vaccination plan and the refusal to continue the public testing regime provides no hope for the country’s fight against COVID-19.
“As I stand here as the Ranking Member on the Parliamentary Select Committee on Health, if you ask me when we are going to roll out the next vaccination plan, the answer is I don’t know, and the worst of it all is that we have stopped testing. Now, if you have a positive case, it takes you the patient to go and test your relatives. The only way we can arrest the rise in the active cases is vaccination,” he said.
However, Mr. Nsiah Asare on shot down Mr. Akandoh’s comments, insisting that the government cannot roll out a specific vaccination strategy when it is still struggling to procure vaccines.
“The Serum Institute of India has a problem with the second wave and they are giving their vaccines to their people, so we do not have any control over the number of vaccines that are coming. We may not know the rollout which is coming from vaccination because as we sit here, we do not manufacture any vaccine in this country.
“We depend on the multinationals and countries such as UK and US so nobody can sit in any country where vaccines are not manufactured to say tomorrow we are starting our vaccination plan. We have the plan in place but we have to wait. ” Dr. Nsiah Asare said.
Ghana’s COVID-19 situation
There has been a steady rise in the number of cases in recent days, after it dropped below 500 a few weeks ago.
The country currently has an active case count of 2,314 after recording 143 new cases on July 9, 2021, per the latest update from the Ghana Health Service.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic in the country on March 12, 2020, a total of 97,728 cases have been recorded.
Out of this number, 94,612 persons have recovered from the disease and 802 persons have succumbed to it.
Recently, the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), asked the police to enforce strict adherence to the COVID-19 protocols to prevent the spread of the highly contagious COVID-19 strain, Delta.
“The Commission urges the Ghana Police Service to enforce strict adherence to the COVID-19 prevention protocols to curb the spread of the Delta variant,” the NCCE said in a statement.
