In total, Ghana has received 422,400 Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccines through the AVAT and other sources.
A representative of the AVAT, Ama Amoah, presented the vaccine to the Chief director of the Ministry of Health, Kwabena Boadu Oku-Afari, at the Kotoka International Airport, reports the website of the state-owned Daily Graphic.
Oku-Afari said the consignment was the second batch of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine Ghana had taken delivery of, after the first consignment of 177,600 doses.
According to him, Ghana was expected to receive 16,918,749 doses of the vaccine under the AVAT, which would be carried out periodically.
Moderna vaccines coming
Ghana will receive its first batch of Moderna vaccines this week as it targets a threshold of 20 million to achieve herd immunity by October in the fight against COVID-19.
Anthony Nsiah Asare, the presidential advisor on health, said roughly 1.2 million Moderna vaccines are expected in the country in the first week of September.
He also stressed that the districts have the capacity to store the doses, following improvements to the national cold chain system.
“I’m happy to inform you that for the first time we’re getting the slightly ultra-cold vaccines. We’re getting Moderna – 1.299 million vaccines. We’ve improved considerably on our cold chain system,” Dr Asare told the host of Town Hall Talk, Kofi Abotsi. “… we’ll also be getting Pfizer very soon – another 1.29 million vaccines.”
He added: “Every district in this country has an ultra-cold system in place. We have one cold-chain van and we’ll be getting ten more to supply the vaccines.
”Our Zipline distribution centres also have an ultra-cold chain system to also distribute the vaccines. I’m sure by next week we’ll receive the Moderna.”
AstraZeneca top-up from Monday
Dr Asare expressed optimism that Ghana is on course to achieve its 20 million herd immunity target by the end of 2021 because Ghanaians should “be expecting a lot of vaccines from now till the end of the year”.
“The good news is that we now have 250,000 AstraZeneca in town and I understand that from 30 August we’ll be deploying them for those who got vaccinated from 10 March.
“Another [piece of] good news is that we’ll be getting another 250,000 AstraZeneca to complete vaccinating the 450,000 who had the first dose.
“Just this afternoon I had an email from the COVAX system that we’re also going to get some 770,000 [additional] AstraZeneca,” he said.
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