Guyana preparing to vaccinate children, 5 to 11, against COVID-19

…USAID funding to tackle vaccine hesitancy, misinformation

With the aim of fully reopening schools across the country, the Guyana Government is preparing to roll out the COVID-19 vaccination campaign for children in the nursery and primary levels in the coming weeks.

This is after the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) earlier this week granted emergency use authorisation for the Pfizer-BioNTech to be administered to children between the ages of five and 11. It is now expected that similar approval will be given by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) soon.
Currently, Guyana is using the Pfizer jab to inoculate its adolescent population (12 to 17) along with pregnant and breastfeeding mothers. Recent figures show that some 27,055 or 37.1 per cent of persons between the ages of 12 and 17 have received their first dose and approximately 17,647 or 24.2 per cent of them are fully immunised.

In anticipation of the approvals in the US, Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony on Wednesday announced the expansion in the percentage of Guyana’s population that would be eligible for vaccination against the deadly virus.
Dr Anthony said he was not worried about the response to the immunisation of this new age cohort since they would continue to use the Pfizer jab with which thousands of teenagers have been vaccinated. He added that there were lots of credible information out there for parents and guardians to access in order to make an informed decision.
“The track record, the safety of the vaccine is there so that people can analyse that safety data… It has gone through rigorous studies so we know that it’s a safe vaccine… The benefits of this vaccine far outweigh whatever risks there might be and that is why we are urging parents to encourage their children and adults to get vaccinated,” the Minister stressed during Wednesday’s COVID-19 update.

Reopening of schools
He went on to point out that Government wanted to fully reopen schools so that children could return to normal in-class learning.
After the outbreak of COVID-19 here in March 2020, schools were closed with little to no engagements. However, when the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Government took office in August last year, a series of virtual learning initiatives were implemented.
Then public schools across Guyana were partially reopened for face-to-face learning in September with individualised plans that see a limited number of children allowed to attend classes at a time. Additionally, school hours have been drastically reduced, in some cases, to two-to-three-hour sessions.
But according to the Health Minister, a loss of learning has been occurring over the past year.
“The curriculum has not been adequately covered. The material that children ought to cover, they have not done. Many times, when they’re supposed to be online studying, because they are not supervised, they’re probably not able to study properly. So, these things have affected how children learn and definitely would create a learning loss, and we would see that showing up more when they are ready to write various exams.
“So, we have to get children safely in schools and one way of doing that is, really, for them to be vaccinated. So, with the impending approval of Pfizer for 11 to 5, potentially we have primary and nursery school kids getting vaccinated and can start to return to school,” Dr Anthony noted.
In preparation for this, the Health Minister pointed out that Government would have to sensitise and educate parents, guardians, teachers and the general public on the vaccination of children.

Tackling vaccine hesitancy
To this end, Dr Anthony disclosed that Government would be directing its portion of a US$2.5 million donation from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to Caricom, to address COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and misinformation including among parents.
Earlier this week, it was announced that Guyana was among three Caribbean countries that would benefit from the US$2.5 million funding to fight COVID-19.
“We had discussions with USAID and among the things we had flagged with them is the whole notion of vaccine hesitancy because across the Region, a lot of people still harbour a lot of myths pertaining to vaccines and because of that, it has maybe deterred them from going to take the vaccine… In this pandemic, if you are not vaccinated, you have a higher risk of getting infected and hospitalised and even dying from COVID. Therefore, vaccination is very important.
“So, these funds would assist the countries in the Region to improve their communication with the general population and encouraging them to get vaccinated, and understanding the benefits of vaccination… and I’m sure that some of the countries would use the funding to educate parents, to educate teachers, and to educate the general public pertaining to vaccination amongst children,” the Health Minister stated.
According to Dr Anthony, they will have to conduct surveys to ascertain what misinformation is being peddled about the vaccines or what concerns persons have in order to properly dispel them.
In fact, he noted that Government has already been using a programme from the Johns Hopkins University, that was being used for its malaria campaign, to respond to some of the myths being circulated about the COVID-19 jabs.
“That programme has been helpful in putting out facts rather than the misinformation that has been circulating so. This programme has helped us to counter some of that misinformation. So, the funding that we will receive from USAID would go into responding to some of these things, because on daily basis people are on social media and they tend to believe some of these things that are on social media… So, we now have to come up with a programme to counter that,” he explained. (G8)