The Pan American Health Organisation/ World Health Organisation (PAHO/WHO) is currently supporting several countries to be supplied with an effective COVID-19 vaccine when the first batch is ready. Guyana is one of 92 countries being supported.
PAHO’s representative in Guyana, Dr. William Adu-Krow, has said that the vaccine is “fast-tracked given the years vaccines take [to develop] …Now two of the trials are in the third stage of human trials so we should expect something at the end of the first quarter of 2021.”
The two third-stage trials belong to Moderna, a biotechnology company in the United States of America, and AstraZeneca/University of Oxford in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
PAHO/WHO is also working with the Global Alliance for Vaccines (GAVI) to accelerate the development and manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines (COVAX), and to guarantee its accessibility to every country.
According to Dr. Adu-Krow, in the initial stage countries will be given vaccines for 10% of their population but Guyana is one of the countries that would require greater effort to control the spread of the virus and would receive an additional 25%.
