From next week, the Ministry of Health will be stepping up its COVID-19 vaccination campaign again, this time targeting children between the ages of 5 and 11 years.

The Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony has announced that vaccines will be available for the 5 to 11 years category from next week.

“From next week we will be introducing the vaccines for children 5-11 years of age. These are special formulations, these are not the regular vaccines that we have been giving, this would be a special vaccine made by Pfizer, especially for this age category”, Dr. Anthony said.

The vaccines for the children form part of a donation from the Government of Spain of 50,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines. Half of that amount are the ones intended for children.

Guyana is also expecting to receive additional vaccines later this year through the COVAX initiative.  

“We have a limited supply and so it would be on a first-come, first-serve basis when we start rolling this out and we will have enough vaccines for 25,000 children in the first batch of vaccines we will be giving so those people who are interested they will have to make sure that they come early.”

The vaccination drive comes at a time when the vaccination rate has slowed down.  Since Guyana lifted most of the COVID-19 restrictions, the vaccination numbers have been moving slowly.   

The Minister said there are many children who contracted COVID over the past two years and he would like to see the children population better protected.

“Part of the difficulty here is the need for permission from the parents. So if a young person does not have permission from their parents, we cannot vaccinate them and so these numbers have remained relatively low.”

The Ministry of Health is reminding persons that the best bet against COVID-19 is to be fully vaccinated.  

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