The Northern Region is reeling from a setback in the fight against the novel coronavirus.
Thousands of Covid-19 jabs deployed to the region as part of the ongoing vaccinations are due to expire by Friday, April 16, 2021.
According to the Regional Director for Public Health, Hilarius Abiwu, the first batch of AstraZeneca doses which were manufactured in October 2020, are expected to last for half a year.
“So effectively that’s six months will be on the 16th of this month,” he told the GBC.
According to him, a safety directive by the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) to hold off vaccinations a few days to the expire day means his outfit must halt administering jabs from today.
Mr Abiwu said, “three days ago, we had more than 5000 doses. And more than 2,000 close to 3,000 of these doses were taken up by people.”
This leaves all other persons who are looking to be administered with the vaccines stranded as the Northern Regional Health Director indicates that “there are more people who are calling for the vaccines.”
Some health experts have already lamented the situation in the Norther Region.
Public Health Expert and Adjunct Professor at New York University, Nana Kofi Quakyi describes its as a “terrible shame for any of Ghana’s already limited supply of #COVID19 vaccines to go to waste.”
“Merits some serious thinking about the rate of uptake, the persistence of vaccine hesitancy, and the effectiveness of efforts to combat (digital),” he posted on Twitter.
The development comes at a time when African countries are facing potential delays to their vaccine rollouts because of global supply issues.
Ghana has so far administered 742,349 doses of the Covid-19 vaccines as of April 12, 2021.
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