Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony on Monday stated that the ministry intends to have additional vaccination outreach programmes in schools to increase the inoculation numbers among the adolescent age category.
This was disclosed during the Minister’s daily COVID-19 update where he stated that in the 12 to 17 age category, 32,873 first dose vaccines were administered, accounting for 45.1% while 23,383 second doses were distributed accounting for 32.1% of the age category.
“Now again the big challenge here is a lot of children have not been getting their vaccines because they haven’t received explicit permission from their parents,” he noted. He reminded that in order for children within that category to be inoculated, parents must give their consent.
As such, Anthony appealed to parents to give their consent and have their children protected against the novel coronavirus. He mentioned that since the beginning of the pandemic, 7,832 paediatric cases were recorded even though most were mildly infected and did not require hospitalisation. It was further noted that unfortunately, 55 of those cases were hospitalised and 17 deaths occurred. He expressed the hope that parents will understand the seriousness of having their children vaccinated against the virus.
“We want to have more programmes in the school system to make sure that we can do the vaccination but we can only give these vaccines if the child comes back with permission to say that they have received parental consent.”
Meanwhile, during the update, he noted that as it relates to the adult vaccination campaign, 426,317 first doses were administered accounting for 83.1% of the population, while 317,770 second doses were administered accounting for 61.9% of the adult population.
As it relates to the COVID-19 booster doses, 42,629 shots were administered thus far with the minister stating that this can and should be improved significantly.
