Guyana will receive 20,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines from China today while another 80,000 are expected next Monday from India.
Health Minister, Dr. Frank Anthony during his daily COVID-19 update stated that the donation of some 20,000 Sinopharm vaccines by China is expected to arrive in Guyana this evening.
These vaccines the minister reiterated have an efficacy level of 79.4% and will aid in the continuation of immunization for healthcare workers. “The Sinopharm vaccine, it’s 79.4% efficacious and this is going to be a very good vaccine to help us to immunize our frontline workers”, he said.
In addition, the minister noted that India’s donation of some 80,000 AstraZeneca vaccines is expected to arrive in Guyana on March 8th.
“It is a similar vaccine that is coming as a donation from the Government of India, so we’re expecting about 80,000 doses on the 8th of March”, Anthony said, while adding that this, too, will be beneficial as they already have had experience in rolling out that specific vaccine which requires two doses.
“And it’s very efficacious if we are using a longer time interval and so the scientific studies that were done have shown that if instead of doing the four weeks from the first dose to the booster dose, if you do that for 12 weeks then that would be more effective, to be about 82%”, he said, while adding that it is part of the country’s protocol for rolling out those vaccines.
While the authorities have reportedly exhausted the initial tranche of 3,000 shots which were received as a donation from Barbados, Anthony stated that with the additional set of AstraZeneca vaccines which are expected next Monday, they will ensure that enough doses are set aside to provide that booster shot for those 3,000 persons who have received their first shot.
“We would make sure that we have enough booster dose so that when we administer the first dose we will save the second dose for those when they need the second dose, so we will have that set aside”, Anthony stated.
Meanwhile, during his presentation yesterday in the budget debate, the minister announced that healthcare workers in Regions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 have been inoculated.
Anthony mentioned that the government is working on bilateral ties to procure vaccines so as to ensure that they can expand the recipients of vaccines in the country. He noted that as those vaccines come in they will not only roll out vaccines in Georgetown but they will be able to do so all across the country with the 35 teams that have been trained.
“so we are going to be doing this simultaneously and because we have been preparing our storage sites we would also have storage capacity in every region where we can deploy these vaccines so our teams in there can pick them up and be able to deploy these vaccines”, the health minister said.
With that he mentioned that even with the expected set of vaccines Guyana would still be far away from achieving herd immunity as he noted that approximately 80% of the population needs to be immunized to achieve such a feat.
“Well we will still be a far way from herd immunity because with the allocation say of 200,000 doses that would only mean that 100,000 persons we would be able to immunize”, he said.
