Haiti, one of only four countries in the world that has not yet begun to vaccinate against Covid-19, is rejecting the AstraZeneca laboratory vaccine offered by the World Health Organization (WHO) through the Covax mechanism, he told a government source on Tuesday. .
The source, who asked for anonymity, explained that the government has refused to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine because of “the global commotion surrounding it” as the country’s population “will not accept it”.
The Haitian authorities have asked the WHO to send vaccines from other laboratories to the country, but the organization is currently “recalcitrant” to offer an alternative and is trying to “pressurize” Haiti by telling the authorities that ” deadlines expire. ” “
“Because it is a gift, they want to impose it on us. Countries that have better systems than us have difficulty with it,” said the source.
Haiti has the capacity to receive the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines and lacks the necessary cooling systems for the Pfizer vaccine.
In the first round of Covax vaccine assignment, 756,000 doses manufactured by the Serum Institute of India under license from AstraZeneca had been assigned to Haiti.
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has not yet responded to Efe’s questions about Covax allocations to Haiti.
The Caribbean country has been relatively unaffected by the coronavirus, with a total of 12,732 confirmed cases and 251 deaths, according to official statistics.
While these data do not reflect the true magnitude of the pandemic in Haiti due to the limited capacity to detect the virus in the country, COVID-19 did not cause the health services to collapse.
WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus highlighted this Tuesday that 190 of the 194 countries that make up the organization have begun vaccination processes.
The Ethiopian expert did not clarify which are the four countries that have not yet been able to initiate vaccinations, although he emphasized that 36 million vaccines have already been sent to 86 countries on the planet through the Covax dose-sharing program.