No COVID-19 vaccines discarded due to expiration – Health Minister

Throughout Guyana’s COVID-19 immunisation campaign, the Health Ministry has been able to utilise all vaccines before they expired – eliminating any wastage.
This was according to Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony who during a recent press conference stated that the vaccines do have an expiry date but Guyana has been able to use all supplies donated or purchased before the timeline. As such, no shots have been wasted by virtue of expiry.
“We haven’t had that challenge. Some of the vaccines that we did receive had short dates, especially those that we received from COVAX. We have been utilising it and making sure that we utilise it within the timeframe. We haven’t had a challenge of throwing away or giving away. Any of the vaccines that we received, we have been utilising those vaccines,” said Dr Anthony.
There was one instance where 216 doses were taken to a remote community, but spoiled due to the inclement weather conditions that prevented the health team from accessing dry ice.

“When they went in, not a lot of people took the vaccine and because it rained and no aircraft could have gone in to pick them up, we weren’t able to get dry ice in to that team and the rest of the vaccine that didn’t utilise basically got spoiled. We do have an occasion in this particular case where we had spoilage but we haven’t had any cases where vaccines expired on us and we had to dump it. We didn’t have that.”
So far, Guyana has been able to secure 62,400 doses of Astra Zeneca vaccines from COVAX with more to arrive until 20 per cent of the population is covered. There were donations of 3000 doses of AstraZeneca shots from Barbados, 20,000 Sinopharm doses from China and another 80,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from India.
Government has procured 400,000 doses of Sputnik V vaccines from Dubai. Some 305,000 doses of this has so far arrived and the additional 95,000 is expected to arrive soon. Another 100,000 doses of Sinopharm vaccines from China will arrive within the next two weeks.
Through an African Union/Caricom Agreement, Guyana is procuring 148,000 doses of vaccines – a portion of which will include Johnson and Johnson single-dose vaccines.
To ensure sufficient supplies, Government has held bilateral discussions with countries, namely India, China, Russia, the US, the EU, Kuwait and the UAE. In addition, Guyana had bilateral talks with AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson and Johnson, SinoPharm, Covaxin, Russian Direct Investment Fund. There were discussions with several multilateral organisations, including the Organisation of the Islamic States, the African Union/Caricom initiative and COVAX.