On that fateful Saturday, when Kelvin, a 17-year-old business student in one of Ghana’s prestigious boy’s senior high schools in the Volta Region, stepped into Scripture Union (SU) meeting, the gathering was later to confirm his worst fear on the COVID-19 vaccine.
Before reporting to school in January 2022, he had heard in the news that the government had extended COVID-19 vaccination to cover adolescents 15 to 17 years but was skeptical about taking the vaccine.
After a powerful prayer session, the preacher for the day in what Kelvin refers to as ‘prophetic session’ cautioned students against taking the vaccine, which, he described, as ‘demonic’, a mark of “666”, and could have negative impact on one’s manhood among other conspiracy theories suggesting that it was a whole satanic agenda.
Over a year now since 15 to 17 year olds were roped into the eligible population for COVID-19 vaccination, it had to take a recent advocacy outreach by the Coalition of NGOs in Health in the region to persuade Kelvin and other compatriots to go for their jab.
With that hurdle over, there was another challenge; the only vaccine approved by Ghana’s Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) for such age group, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccines, had run out across the country.
This is part of a national widespread shortage of vaccines used for routine immunisation of babies from birth to 18 months, including those for polio, hepatitis B, measles and tuberculosis, since late February 2023.
Checks by this reporter in major health facilities in the Greater Accra Region established that while they had been restocked with some childhood vaccines, the Pfizer vaccines were still out of stock, suggestive of the general scarce situation in the country at present.
Data from the Ghana Health Service (GHS) indicates that about 400,000 school children in various high schools have been vaccinated against COVID-19 since November 2021.
This feeds into the national figure of nearly 11 million people fully vaccinated against the disease in the country, representing 57.3 per cent of the national target of 18.2 million for herd immunity.
Although the World Health Organisation (WHO) classifies children and adolescents as “low-risk group” in terms of susceptibility to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, it notes that their inoculation was crucial to “fully protecting the highest risk groups”.
“Children transmit COVID-19 at a lower rate to children than to adults. However, household adults are at the highest risk of transmission from an infected child, more so than adults or children in other settings,” a 2022 study on Child transmission of SARS-CoV-2 published by Silverberg etal indicates.
Ghana recorded a significant number of school outbreaks of COVID-19 at the peak of the pandemic with confirmed cases reported in children as low as six months.
A survey conducted by the GHS in June last year revealed that 18.1 per cent of COVID-19 cases at the time were among children between the ages of 0-15.
If you look at the age distribution, you can see that 0-5 is 3.8 per cent, 6-10 years about 6.9 per cent of the cases between May and June and then 11-15 years about 7.4 per cent.
The youth become a critical group that we need to take a look at, and because most of them cannot be vaccinated now, the protocol has to be stepped up. The youngest child who had the virus was six months. The sibling came from school and infected the family, including the baby,” Dr Kuma-Aboagye, the Director-General of the GHS,said at a news conference.
Currently, there is a sustained decline in COVID-19 cases in Ghana with only 18 active cases recorded as of May 15, 2023, a situation that led to the lift of all restrictions at the country’s entry points.
It followed a declaration by the WHO on May 5, 2023 that COVID-19 was no longer considered a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).
However, given the unpredictable nature of the SARS-CoV-2 variants, the international health body cautions that the announcement places a higher responsibility on nations to guard against local outbreaks and surge in cases by plugging all loopholes tolimit transmission and ensuringeffective response and management.
The school environment remains a major ground for a possible COVID-19 outbreak, considering its sensitive nature and risk of spread of the disease.
“There must be targeted and increased efforts to get a lot of adolescents in the schools vaccinated to ensure that the population is adequately protected,” the National Chairman of the Coalition of NGOs in Health, Bright Amissah-Nyarko, stressed.
He said the shortage of Pfizer vaccines for adolescents at a time the country was considering extending vaccination to children as low as 10 years was a major worry,urging the government to urgently restock health facilities with the vaccines to sustain gains made in achieving herd immunity in the country.
The Programme Manager of the Expanded Programme on Immunisation, Dr Kwame Amponsah-Achiano, speaking to this reporter, admitted the nationwide shortage of Pfizer vaccines, although health authorities were making frantic efforts to purchase some.
“We only have Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) COVID-19 vaccine in our cold rooms now but we have requested for some Pfizer and working with GAVI to get some two million doses into the system for the next six months to a year to cater for our school vaccinations.”
Dr Amponsah-Achiano says the risk of unvaccinated persons in the system remained a concern, although the disease is no longer of PHEIC. As such, the GHS was working on an integration plan to include COVID-19 vaccine into routine adult immunisation.
“For us, our worry is to get as many eligible persons as possible vaccinated because COVID-19 remains a local concern to us and so there is still the need for people to take the vaccines,” he said.
There is the tendency for Kelvin and other unvaccinated children to lose interest again in taking the COVID-19 jab now that they are ready but the vaccines are out of stock. It may also give room for them to buy intoemerging conspiracies against the vaccines in view of the fact that the pandemic has been declared to be of no serious public health concern.
Most riskily is the fact that due to the often crowded school environment, a spike could be inevitable and that could pose a risk to students and their families.
The government must hasten in bringing in the Pfizer vaccines to get more school children inoculated as it considers roping in much younger ones to keep cases at bay.
COVID-19 vaccines demonstrate at least 50 per cent efficacy against severe diseaseand despite the disease being declared of no international emergency, the significance of vaccination has not changed. Vaccination remains the mainstay of COVID-19 prevention and children must not be overlooked.
BY ABIGAIL ANNOH
