The Haitian health authorities said on Tuesday they were unaware of the offer to donate vaccines against covid-19 announced by the Government of the Dominican Republic last week, as well as revealing that they would reject the donation because the country has several thousands of doses of the Modern vaccine.
This was announced to Efe by the Director General of the Haitian Ministry of Health, Laure Adrién.
“No one has contacted us at the ministry for such an offer (of vaccines from the Dominican Republic) and if that were the case, the answer would have been negative anyway because we have in existence several hundred thousand doses of the Modern vaccine, of the which we have no guarantee we can use before their expiration date, ”the doctor explained.
Adrién clarified that the priority of the Haitian authorities is to be able to use the maximum of Modern vaccines before their expiration.
The batch of the compound was received by the country in mid-July as a donation from the United States through the United Nations COVAX mechanism. That was when Haiti began vaccinating its population.
The Dominican government announced last Friday that it will give Haiti 100,000 doses of the covid-19 vaccine from the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.
“The Dominican Republic would not have been the first friendly country to have said no to the supply of vaccine doses, because at the moment our priority is to be able to use it before the maximum Modern vaccine expires,” the Haitian official said. .
The Dominican government donated 304,000 doses of AstraZeneca to Guatemala on Monday and another 101,000 to Honduras.
“If a country offers us vaccines that not only do we not need urgently but also have an expiration date that is not postponed to less than 12 to 18 months from receipt, we will automatically reject the offer,” added Adrién.
Last April, Haiti rejected the AstraZeneca laboratory vaccine offered to it by the World Health Organization (WHO) through the COVAX mechanism.
On this occasion, the Haitian government declined to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine because of “the global uproar around it,” considering that the country’s population “will not accept it.”