Haiti, one of only four countries in the world that has not started vaccinating against covid-19, rejects the AstraZeneca laboratory vaccine offered to it by the World Health Organization (WHO) through the COVAX mechanism, it said on Tuesday. in Efe a government source.
The source, who requested anonymity, explained that the government has declined to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine because of “the global uproar around it,” considering that the country’s population “does not he will accept it “.
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 “pressure” Haiti by telling authorities that “the deadlines are ‘exhaust’.
“Because it is a gift, they want to impose it on us. Countries that have better systems than us have difficulty managing it,” the source commented.
Haiti has the capacity to receive AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines and does not have the necessary refrigeration systems for the Pfizer vaccine.
In the first round of COVAX vaccine allocation, 756,000 doses manufactured by the Serum Institute of India under license from AstraZeneca had been allocated to Haiti.
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has not yet answered Efe’s questions about COVAX allocations in Haiti.
The Caribbean country has been relatively little affected by the coronavirus, with a total of 12,732 confirmed cases and 251 deaths, according to official statistics.
Although these data do not reflect the true magnitude of the pandemic in Haiti due to the limited virus detection capacity in the country, covid-19 has not caused the collapse of health services.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday that 190 of the 194 countries in the organization had begun vaccination processes.
The Ethiopian expert did not clarify which are the four countries that have not yet been able to start vaccinations, although he stressed that through the COVAX program for equal dose distribution, 36 million vaccines have already been sent to 86 countries. of the planet.