A Fellow at the Centre for Social Justice, Dr William Menson, has noted that the number of people targeted in the first vaccination exercise against the coronavirus is woefully inadequate.
He said on the maiden edition of the First Take programme on 3FM hosted by Dzifa Bampoe on Monday March 29 that the country must make it a priority to get more people inoculated against the virus.
“We are not yet out of the woods. It is good to know that for the past few weeks or so the number of new infections and severe disease have started going down. I really hope that these statistics are not because we are not testing as, much as we need to.
‘The ongoing vaccination gave us a lot of promises with respect to the kind of outcome we want but then the number of people vaccinated, 600,000 is really a drop in the ocean looking at our population because the aim of this vaccination is for us to reach a certain critical mass, a certain critical proportion that will give us the herd immunity.
“Unfortunately I do not think it is enough and so I think at this point whet we need is a lot more answers. It is reassuring that we will be getting the vaccines but it will be good to know when. First of all the Covax facility will only take acre of about the 20 per cent of our population and the rest is expected to be borne by n the government.
“The earlier we vaccinated this huge number of people the better because the longer we wait the virus will also need to protect itself from us.”
Ghana received 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccines from the Serum Institute of India as part of efforts to tackle the pandemic.
The West African country became the first country to take delivery of the COVAX vaccines when it received the consignment at the Kotoko International Airport.
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has said the government is on course to procuring 42 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccines to achieve its targeting 20 million vaccinated Ghanaians by the end of the year.
Mr Akufo-Addo said with the procurement of the vaccines, it is expected that Ghanaian adults population would be vaccinated.
The President said this in his address at the 11th quadrennial delegates congress of the Trade Union Congress (TUC), Tuesday, 23 March, 2021, at Ejisu in the Ashanti region on the theme: “75 years of TUC: Building stronger union in a challenging world of work”.
He said: “So far, nearly 500,000 persons have been vaccinated and the government is on course to procuring a total of 42 million vaccines to achieve the target of vaccinating 20 million Ghanaians by the end of the year.
“This will mean the entire adult population of our country would have been vaccinated by the end of the year”.
By Laud Nartey|3news.com|Ghana
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