A total of 21, 163, 810 COVID-19 vaccines doses had been administered in the country as at November 25, 2022.
Of the 21, 163, 810 vaccines administered, 12,155,754 persons had received at least one dose against the disease with 9, 097,749 persons having been fully vaccinated and 2, 639, 160 receiving one booster dose.
The Director of Health Promotion, Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr Dacosta Aboagye disclosed this at the closing ceremony of COVID-19 National vaccination Campaign in Accra yesterday.
The three months campaign implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) in partnership with GHS and African German Health Association (AGHA), World Vision and Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) aimed to increase public awareness on the importance of getting vaccinated against the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr Aboagye, also the Leader of Risk Communication and Community Engagement (RCCE) for Covid-19 National Response said the number of doses of COVID-19 vaccines administered was an indication that people were taking the COVID-19 vaccination seriously.
“The current figures recorded so far is remarkable because our target was 20 million and we have done well by exceeding over one million as a country. However, there is more work to be done despite the achievement made,” he added.
He said in September, 2022 alone, about 1,026,785 people were vaccinated against the disease in the country.
He indicated that, despite the strides made, there were some districts which were still struggling in terms of partaking in the jab which needed to be concentrated and know how best they could scale up in the vaccination process.
Dr Aboagye said strategies employed for the vaccination uptake were targeted settings such as schools, churches, mosque, health centres, airport, outreaches, community and house to house campaign, using Members of Parliament for community forums, capacity building among others.
He indicated that, the main focus of the GHS for the exercise was capacity building linking up with campaigns which were mainly held in various districts of the country.
However, he said, despite the numerous campaigns, there were still widespread misconceptions on the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccination.
The situation, he said had led to vaccine hesitancy and a low uptake of the COVID-19 vaccines in the country saying “currently, around 36 per cent of the population has received at least one dose of the vaccine and this requires much effort to further increase uptake.”
The Component Manager, GIZ, Ms Ariane Von Maercker said the national campaign was part of the German Last Mile Initiative.
The initiative, she said was to rapidly increase global COVID-19 vaccine coverage and uptake where Germany provided 224 million EUR for bilateral projects worldwide and direct support for vaccination campaigns and overall, more than 1.3 billion EUR were made available in 2022 to help end the pandemic.
However, the common challenges some of the partners in their presentation identified during the execution of the exercise were inadequate logistics and Covid-19 centers to embark on the exercise.
In all, they indicated that, the exercise was successful.
As part of the closing ceremony, GIZ Ghana donated equipment such as laptops, desktops, tablets, printers and cameras to the Ghana Health Service.
The equipment is intended to strengthen the use of digital health information system.
BY VIVIAN ARTHUR
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