Haiti, one of the only four countries in the world that has not begun to vaccinate against covid-19, rejects the AstraZeneca laboratory vaccine offered by the World Health Organization (WHO) through the Covax mechanism, he told this Tuesday to Efe a government source.
The source, who requested anonymity, explained that the Government has declined to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine due to “the global commotion surrounding it,” considering that the country’s population “will not accept it.”
The Haitian authorities have asked the WHO to send the country vaccines from other laboratories, but the organization at the moment is “recalcitrant” to offer an alternative and is trying to “pressure” Haiti by telling the authorities that “time is running out.”
«As it is a gift, they want to impose it on us. Countries that have better systems than us have difficulties managing it, ”commented the source.
Haiti has the capacity to receive the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines and lacks 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 responded to Efe’s questions about Covax allocations to 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 capacity to detect the virus in the country, COVID-19 has not caused the collapse of health services.
The director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, highlighted this Tuesday that 190 of the 194 countries that are part of the organization have begun the 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 the equal distribution of doses, 36 million vaccines have already been sent to 86 countries on the planet.