Vaccines available in Guyana for COVID-19 are safe

WITH VACCINE HESITANCY STILL A BULWARK against the ongoing immunisation
campaign to help beat back the rampaging coronavirus, health ministry advisor Dr Leslie
Ramsammy gave the inoculation cause a much-needed ‘shot in the arm’ extolling the safety and
efficacy of the vaccines available here.
“There is no reason to be fearful. You know Guyanese have the best. All of you at your age
would have never seen polio; you would have never seen mumps and measles (or) whooping
cough. Well, you couldn’t, because of vaccines. I know for sure that each one of you here
(referring to the reporters) received no less than 16 vaccines…some of you have gotten 18
vaccines if you have taken the HPV,” Dr Ramsammy said.
Dr. Ramsammy was at the time speaking to reporters after a recent health ministry graduation
exercise where he urged residents to put aside whatever fears that they may have about the jab
freely available nationwide in the fight against the pandemic which has killed 4.5 million
globally and more than 650 locally.
Before 1990, some 2000 Guyanese children died annually from preventable ailments, but today
deaths have plummeted because of the availability of vaccines.
“Vaccines have helped us and in 1990 and before 2500 children died every year and do you
know how many died now? Less than 200. One of the major reasons is vaccines. So it makes me
upset when I hear people who have taken their children to the health centres to get vaccinated tell
me that they are afraid of vaccines. When you took your child to get those vaccines didn’t it
bother you?” he asked rhetorically.
Dr Ramsammy blamed mischief making and fear mongering for a number of myths and rumours
now circulating nationally which have sowed doubts and created undue fear and confusion in
peoples’ minds about the efficacy and safety of vaccines used to inoculate the 750,000-odd
population.

“I think people are making up reasons about some kind of technological reason (citing the use of)
microchips (to) follow all of you because of some political reasons.”
“You think the leader of the opposition would have taken the vaccine if he thinks that we were
going to spy on you? It is absurd. If you are really interested in knowing where the vaccines
come from you first defend yourself, protect yourself and we have all the time in the world to
figure that out,” Ramsammy said.
“I took the vaccine and I ain’t see no ‘mark of the beast on me’. It is absurd. Yes, there are
people who will have genuine concerns. One person said that vaccines usually take about 10 to
fifteen years to develop and that may have been true. But how technology has developed, science
has taught us how to do it faster.”
“When I started my career, it used to take us weeks to do one DNA analysis. But now it takes us
a matter of minutes. The same thing with typing a document, it used to take days to type a
document on the typewriters, and then somebody has to read it and now you can do it as you go,”
the former health minister explained.
He used the Pfizer vaccine produced in the USA as an example how technology has fast tracked
development of inoculants.
“That’s the difference, technology has made it much easier for us to make out the genetic make-
up of a virus and then convert that into a vaccine. It took the Chinese less than two weeks to
figure out the genetics and it was published at 6 PM that day.
The Oxford University had a design for the vaccine the very next day,” Dr Ramsammy
revealed.