80,000 COVID vaccines to arrive from India next week

The Government of India will be donating 80,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine to Guyana and according to the Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony, these vaccines are expected here sometime next week.

The minister made the announcement during the daily COVID-19 update on Friday. The Indian government has pledged some 500,000 doses of the vaccine to the Caribbean region and Guyana is receiving its doses of the jab from this tranche.

“In that allocation, Guyana is going to get 80,000 doses and those doses we are expecting would come into Guyana sometime next week.

“We are now working on the exact date and time when those vaccines are going to arrive,” Dr Anthony said.

On February 10, 2021, Barbados donated 3,000 doses of its Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines to Guyana; Barbados had received 100,000 doses of the vaccine from India.

Guyana is also set to benefit from some 104,000 doses of the vaccines through the COVAX facility. The Health Minister, on Thursday, said the government is not certain as to when these vaccines will be made available to Guyana.

“With COVAX, we haven’t really seen that rapid deployment of vaccines. We are hoping that by sometime next week, we would start seeing vaccines coming to the region and hopefully shortly, thereafter, we would be able to get adequate doses as was promised through the mechanism,” the minister said.

Meanwhile, Guyana was also promised a pledge of 22,000 doses of the vaccines from China and another 149,000 through the CARICOM/ African Union agreement.

Earlier this week, Guyana granted emergency use approval of the Russian Sputnik COVID-19 vaccine, as well as, China’s Sinopharm vaccine.