Some 20,470 persons have been vaccinated as of Monday, while no adverse reactions to any of the vaccines used here have been reported.
Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony made these disclosures during yesterday’s COVID-19 update where he again expressed his pleasure at the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines as he noted that around 2,000 shots are administered daily.
“As of yesterday [Monday] we had 20,470 persons who have received their vaccine and we will continue giving vaccines today so generally we do about 2,000 immunisations per day so we will see those numbers keep climbing,” the minister said.
He noted that authorities have observed that there has been a good response to the vaccine, however, the concern about Region Ten remains as there has not been a good uptake as yet. As such he reiterated his call for the authorities to work with more leaders in the communities to bring about a change.
During the update, the minister announced that Region Nine is so far the only region to have all of its frontline healthcare workers receive vaccines for the COVID-19. Apart from this he mentioned that there are some regions that are following closely behind like Two and Six where some 70 per cent of their healthcare workers have been immunised.
And in response to a question posed by Stabroek News during the update, Anthony informed that there have been no reports of adverse reactions to the Sinopharm and AstraZeneca vaccines. He pointed out that the recent controversy which surrounded the AstraZeneca vaccine as it relates to blood clotting has been resolved by the European medical regulatory agency.
“So they have continued the use of the vaccine in Europe so that has alleviated whatever fears people might have had, in Guyana – we continue to monitor,” the minister said. He added that the authorities do not only monitor for the initial 15 minutes that patients are told to wait after receiving their shots, but they also receive follow up calls.
This information that is gathered from the monitoring system, he said, is then fed into the country’s pharmacovigilance system and if certain issues are detected, they would have to act and subsequently make a report to the regional pharmacovigilance system. “We have been doing that, we haven’t detected any adverse events here in Guyana, of course we do have the reactions that people would get with vaccines,” Dr Anthony said.
