With several leaders around the world taking the COVID-19 Vaccines as a sign of confidence in the vaccine, the Ministry of Health, after starting the vaccination campaign, and targeting the frontline workers as the first to be vaccinated, is now looking to vaccinate parliamentarians.
Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony, said during his COVID-19 daily update that Members of Parliament will be catered for during this stage of vaccination based on numerous calls for MPs to be immunised to boost public confidence in the vaccines.
“We are going to consider that during this current run because there are not many parliamentarians and we think we will be able to cover them. So, those parliamentarians who would be interested in getting their vaccine, we will make those vaccines available in this round,” Minister Anthony said
It is unclear how the Ministry plans to do so while sticking to the initial phase which never included MPs.
The Government is set to immunize 80% of the population by year-end. This will happen through a phased process, where Frontline Workers are said to be the first to receive. They would be followed by the elderly, those with underlying conditions and later the rest of the population.
“Our deployment of vaccines, we can envisage … maybe four phases. In the first phase we want to prioritise healthcare workers. We can say that is Phase I (A), then Phase I (B) would be all the people. Phase One (C) would be persons with comorbidities, Phase I (D) would be other essential workers like teachers,” Anthony maintained
The Government has so far received 3000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine from the Government of Barbados (through the Indian/Caribbean Agreement), 20,000 doses of Sinopharm the Government received from China and recently, 80,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine from India.
The Government of Guyana is set to receive several more donations through the COVAX Mechanism. It also will be looking at purchasing some vaccines.
With the two Vaccines at hand, the Ministry of Health will look to distribute the vaccines to all across the country.
These vaccines are said to be administered based on a request by persons and are not deemed mandatory.
