A second supply of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccines arrived in Guyana yesterday.
This batch, which contained some 30,000 doses, arrived in the country on board Amerijet Inter-national. It was purchased by the Government of Guyana.
During yesterday’s COVID-19 update, Health Minister, Dr. Frank Anthony noted that these vaccines have to be kept at cold temperatures around -18 degrees to -20 degrees and as such all arrangements have been put in place to ensure safe storage.
“We have put all the arrangements in place to ensure that when we receive the vaccines that we maintain that cold chain until it arrives at the bond where it can be stored properly”, he said. He added that he was pleased that the country had received an additional 30,000 vaccines.
The Minister during the update stated, “We will continue rolling out this week, with these additional vaccines we intend to ramp up and get more people immunized and definitely we have now had some proficiency in the use of Sputnik”, he added. He stated that the staff had special training to be able to handle the vaccines and should be more acquainted with distributing the shots. Sputnik was rolled out here earlier this month after an initial batch of 25,000 doses was received.
Further, Anthony said that the government is still exploring many other options to procure vaccines as he revealed that last week discussions were held with Johnson & Johnson to explore the possibility of accessing their single-shot jab. “So we are still engaged in talks with different manufacturers of vaccines and as those talks mature we will let the public know”, he said.
Thus far, Guyana has received donations of 3,000 AstraZeneca (AZ) vaccines from Barbados, 20,000 Sinopharm vaccines from China and 80,000 AZ vaccines from India. Guyana in turn donated 5,000 shots from the Indian donation to Barbados. Guyana has also received 55,000 shots of Sputnik 5 that it purchased and 24,000 doses of AZ through the COVAX mechanism. All of the vaccines acquired so far require two shots to be administered per person. It would mean that Guyana has received enough vaccines to fully inoculate 88,500 persons. Guyana is expecting a total of 200,000 Sputnik 5 vaccines.
