OMICRON Coronavirus: Ghana Is Not There Yet To Encourage 'Boosters' - GHS Director-General

With some countries recording the Omicron variant of the Coronavirus, there has been calls for vaccinated people to go for boosters to solidify their protection against the new variant.

The call for booster was made by President of the United States, Joe Biden, to his citizens after noting that some Southern African countries have recorded the new variant.

South Africa and Nigeria are some of the first countries reported as having recorded a number of cases and now Ghana has also recorded 34 cases.

The idea of going for boosters was today broached on Peace FM's morning show 'Kokrokoo' during a one on one interview with the Director-General of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr. Patrick Kuma-Aboagye.

Sharing his thoughts on the boosters, Dr. Patrick Kuma-Aboagye noted that, although it's a laudable call for people who have vaccinated to go for extra jab, he honestly thinks Ghana hasn't reached such stage yet.

To him, in a nation like Ghana where 20 million people have been estimated to receive the vaccines but has so far recorded only about 6 million who have vaccinated, it is not advisable to subscribe for boosters not until the country has met her target.

However, he proposed that the aged should be the ones to be encouraged to go for the boosters.

" . . boosters are good but you have to also look at your state of the country. You want to vaccinate 20 million people, you've done about 6 million. The little vaccine you have you want to give it those 6 million vaccinated ones; so there is a lot of equity issues within that.

"But what we're looking at, we still continue to look at is we can identify some people who are at higher risk like much older people while we can decide that maybe for this group but we haven't reached there yet. We may want to encourage a booster for them because equity is important. We can say we have given it to a small number of people and the rest of the country waits while someone has vaccinated three times when you don't have even one'," he told host Kwami Sefa Kayi.