By Adama Makasuba
The Ministry of Health has announced wrapping up its door-to-door vaccination campaign to fight against the expiration of vaccines, but said they are being held back by vaccine hesitancy.
It comes after the Health Ministry announced that about 800,000 doses of donated COVAX vaccines are due for destruction as they approach expiration.
Meanwhile, Momodou Nyassi, deputy director of health service, said health officials across the country have wrapped up efforts to vaccinate many people against the deadly coronavirus disease as the vaccines are due for expiration on 25 January.
“We have vaccinated around more than 40,000 people and now the number of vaccines that are due to expire has drastically reduced now but we are hoping before 25 of January, we will vaccinate nearly 250 to 70, 000 people,” he said.
“We are hoping that the majority of the vaccines will be used before the 25 of January, there expiry date. We are yet to meet the target, but I can say in the whole of Africa, we [The Gambia] are the one leading to that target, we are around almost 11 per cent but if you look at other countries some are less than 5 per cent,” he added.
However, he continued: “of course, we encountered reluctance but the most important thing is to educate them (people) about the benefits of the vaccine and then allow them to make choices on their own. But the most important thing is that we pass the right information about the benefits of taking this vaccine.”
Currently, we are discussing the booster shot, so we have a body that is responsible that should guide us, they call it night tag and they advised the Minister of Health whether Pfizer is necessary for us to take it. But as of today, they are yet to come to the conclusion whether we should take it.