Health Minister reveals that vaccination campaign to rollout next week

The Health Ministry, in collaboration with the Education Ministry is finalising plans to roll out a
vaccination campaign across the country.
The ministry will be observing World Vaccination Week from April 24 to 30. Health Minister,
Dr. Frank Anthony disclosed that special emphasis will be placed on COVID-19, Human
Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination and standard immunisation for children under five years old.
“We are finalising those plans with the Ministry of Education. We hope to finalise them during
next week and once that is done, we will start rolling out the plan,” Dr. Anthony related during
Wednesday’s COVID-19 Update.

Minister Anthony pointed out that this initiative is also expected to boost the uptick of Covid
vaccination for adolescents, as well as provide more information to the public about the US-
made Pfizer vaccine. “So, we have several groups that we’re targeting, we want to of course
increase our COVID-19 vaccination rates during this period so we’ll be running some special
campaigns to make sure that we can encourage more people to come out and get vaccinated,” the
minister said.
Dr Anthony stressed that his ministry continues to encourage and educate citizens about the
importance of the COVID-19 vaccines, however, there is still hesitancy among the population.
“During that week we also want to get more people or school age persons to take the HPV
vaccination so we’ll be doing a separate campaign encouraging people to take HPV
vaccination…,” Dr. Anthony said.
He continued, “We’re also going to focus our attention on the under-fives, so children who need
other types of vaccines…we want to make sure they have received those vaccines.”  The health
minister declared that while the country’s positive cases continue to decrease, the pandemic is
not over in Guyana. He added that they are currently 95 active cases with 14 persons
hospitalised.