Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony yesterday stated that Guyana’s main focus for procuring COVID-19 vaccines is through the COVAX facility.
Dr Anthony was at the time responding to a question posed by Stabroek News during his daily COVID-19 update.
COVAX is one of three pillars of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, which was launched in April by the World Health Organization (WHO), the European Commission and France in response to the pandemic. It strives to ensure that people in all corners of the world get access to COVID-19 vaccines once they are available, regardless of their wealth.
Last September, the minister told a news conference that the ministry was exploring various options regarding the procurement of vaccines for the deadly coronavirus. At the time he revealed that Guyana was in contact with Russia to possibly procure their “Sputnik V” vaccine. When asked yesterday if anything had materialised following the talks with Russia, the minister did not say whether any progress was made.
He however stated that the ministry continues to work with the COVAX facility which he said recently gave countries good news as the facility has now put deals in place to acquire two billion doses of vaccines which it is working on rolling out by the second quarter of 2021.
“Of course the rolling out of the vaccines depends on getting some of the regulatory approval for the vaccines and once they get that and it’s deemed to be safe by the WHO, they will be able to roll that out,” Anthony said.
According to the minister there is a “basket of various vaccines” that are currently approved in a number of countries, however, while they have been given emergency use authorization in those countries, some have not been granted emergency use listing by the World Health Organization (WHO).
“These three vaccines [Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca] have been approved by these various regulatory bodies and all three of them have applied to the WHO for what is called emergency use listing, of the three that have applied only one has received emergency use listing and that is the Pfizer vaccine,” the minister added. He mentioned that the Russian vaccine which was approved for use in Russia is under consideration to be included in the emergency use listing.
Anthony reiterated, “There are several options that are available and we’re still working with COVAX to ensure that we can have access to a vaccine. We know of countries that have been doing bilateral deals outside of COVAX and that is because for this year, COVAX will only be able to give the countries who are participating in that facility, 20 per cent of the vaccines that they require for their population.”
That amount, he pointed out, would not be enough for countries to achieve herd immunity. However, he did not say whether Guyana was also looking at bilateral deals outside of COVAX but stressed that Guyana continues to work with COVAX. “We continue to work with COVAX while we explore with other partners to see whether or not we can access vaccines so that we can have more in the country. Our main focus is really COVAX.”
