Vaccination campaign to rollout next week

─ adolescents to be targeted

The Ministry of Health, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education is finalising plans to roll out a vaccination campaign across the country.

The ministry will be celebrating World Vaccination Week from April 24 to 30. Minister, Dr. Frank Anthony said special emphasis will be placed on COVID-19, Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination and standard immunisation for children under five years old.

“We are finalising those plans with the Ministry of Education. We hope to finalise them during next week and once that is done, we will start rolling out the plan,” the minister said during Wednesday’s COVID-19 Update.

This initiative is also expected to boost the uptick of Covid vaccination for adolescents, as well as provide more information to the public about the US-made Pfizer vaccine.

“So, we have several groups that we’re targeting, we want to of course increase our COVID-19 vaccination rates during this period so we’ll be running some special campaigns to make sure that we can encourage more people to come out and get vaccinated,” Dr. Anthony said.

The health ministry continues to encourage and educate citizens about the importance of the COVID-19 vaccines, however, there is still hesitancy among the population.

As of today, 85.5 percent of the adult population took the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine while 65.8 percent is fully vaccinated.

Also, Dr. Anthony said, “during that week we also want to get more people or school age persons to take the HPV vaccination so we’ll be doing a separate campaign encouraging people to take HPV vaccination…

“We’re also going to focus our attention on the under-fives, so children who need other types of vaccines…we want to make sure they have received those vaccines.” Minister Anthony said while the country’s positive cases continue to decrease, the pandemic is not over in Guyana. Currently there are 95 active cases with 14 persons hospitalised.