Parliament approves $200m to purchase Covid-19 vaccines
Parliament has approved a loan facility of $200 million for the financing of the COVID-19 Emergency Preparedness and Response Project.
The loan is to enable the rolling out of a mass vaccination programme in the country since a number of individuals who had received the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine are yet to receive the second dose.
Presenting the Finance Committee’s report on the floor of Parliament on Tuesday, July 6, 2021, the Committee Chairman, Kwaku Agyeman Kwarteng disclosed that, the facility will be used to purchase COVID-19 vaccines.
According to him, the pressing need to activate a robust COVID-19 vaccination programme as well as strengthen the health system in the country has necessitated the need for this additional financing.
“This is within the context that the number of individuals who had received the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccination in Ghana as of March 2021 is estimated at 475,000 out of the target 17.5 Million people,” he explained.
Currently, a little over 2.5 billion doses of vaccines have been administered across the world but only 0.8% of this has been in lower-middle-income countries such as Ghana.
Ghana’s quest to produce vaccines
At the onset of Ghana’s own portion of the coronavirus global pandemic, President Nana Akufo-Addo promised that his government would look for ways to partner pharmaceutical firms into looking at how to produce vaccines.
The Minister of Health, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu recently revealed deliberations with private pharmaceutical firms to see how they could contribute to the ongoing vaccination programme.
But it is also not very clear if the capacities of Ghana’s pharmaceutical manufacturers measure up to those in the five countries that have previously been cited as the most capable in Africa.
Only five African countries – Egypt, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia – are thought to possess the capacities to produce vaccines. Their facilities produce fewer than 100 million doses a year, most of which is supplied to domestic markets with very little in the way of exports.
No African pharmaceutical companies produce the base ingredients such as antigens, necessary for making vaccines. This puts any Ghanaian vaccine-making ambition at a serious disadvantage and at the mercy of global pharmaceutical giants.
Perhaps, it why the Health Minister has described the Ghanaian capacity as “filling and packing”.
“Their strategy is to do what they call filling and packing first then the science community will also take some time to start developing [a] vaccine in our country. So that area is also seriously being considered and we are actually on course in that direction,” he explained.
Still, a timeline has not been offered as to when these plans would manifest.
Ghana’s vaccine rollout has been chiefly due to the World Health Organisation’s COVAX programme that secures vaccines in a competitive market on behalf of developing nations.