Joseph Yieleh Chireh, a former minister of health, has urged the government to intensify education regarding the COVID-19 vaccine.
This comes after a group calling itself Concerned Ghanaian Doctors petitioned President Akufo-Addo over the mandatory COVID-19 vaccine rollout in the country.
The group said in a statement that it disagrees with the government on mandatory vaccination, saying there are many unanswered questions in terms of its efficacy, necessity, and safety.
However, speaking to Beatrice Adu on the Big Bulletin on Thursday (January 13), Yieleh Chireh said the government must resume its engagements on the vaccine to dispel misinformation and doubts towards the vaccine.
He said: “When you ask people to take a jab to prevent this virus, I don’t think that it’s a simple matter and that’s why I’m calling for more engagements and more explanations. In the beginning, the president [Akufo-Addo] was talking to us (Ghanaians) very frequently and then also, there were interactions with the general public through the media, I think that needs to be intensified.
… One thing that we need to look at is for people with knowledge to talk about this matter. In any pandemic situation like this, you always have difficulty where people deliberately mislead others insisting on certain rights that you cannot enjoy when you’re dead. So, if there was any difficulty in using the vaccine, many more people wouldn’t have been using it,” he stated.
Kwaku Agyeman Manu, Health Minister also asked Ghanaians to ignore the petition by the Concerned Doctors to halt the vaccination process as he described their petition as “without basis”.
The Ghana Medical Association (GMA) has also described the petition as misleading, stating that the contents of the petition are not “based on available local and international scientific data.”
A communique signed by the GMA President, Dr Frank Serebour and the General Secretary Dr Titus Beyuo said “in the era of evidence-based medicine, it is unacceptable that professionals will draw such flawed conclusions based on skewed data that has not gone through the rigours of scientific proof.”
Nicholas Brown
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