Adequate COVID-19 vaccines available – Dr. Anthony

Guyana is not experiencing any shortage of COVID-19 vaccines to continue government’s immunisation exercise to address the spread of the deadly disease.

During the daily Covid update on Tuesday, Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony, M.P., stated that government has adequate Covid vaccines to fully immunise its citizens, as vaccines were procured from various sources.

He explained that the country “would normally get vaccines through COVAX because Guyana is one of the COVAX AMC (Advance Market Commitment) countries and we have benefitted from those donations.

“Bilaterally, we have also received vaccine donations from the US, Spain and some other countries who have given us vaccines, plus we went out and buy vaccines and, in this case, we have been able to purchase Sinopharm and Sputnik vaccines,” Minister Anthony added.

Government has been offered additional vaccines by other countries.

“More recently, we have had a lot of countries offering to donate vaccines to us, but they had short expiry dates… we did not accept those donations because we had adequate supplies,” Dr. Anthony explained.

In January 2021, Guyana received its first batch of AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccines via the partnership between Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) the Vaccine Alliance, the Pan American Health Organisation/World Health Organisation (PAHO/WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).