More COVID-19 vaccines for South Sudan: WHO

By Simon Deng

More than half a million COVID-19 vaccines are scheduled for delivery in South Sudan in early 2022, an official of the World Health Organization (WHO) said.

The African nation with some of the worst health services received donations of vaccines throw the COVAX facility this year, about over half a million doses already.

According to Brendan Dineen, the Covax Vaccine Coordinator for the World Health Organization, the country will have received about a million doses.

“We have a lot of vaccine in our hands –we already have half a million that has reached South Sudan, and by the end of this year or sometime in January, we will have approximately one million doses,” Dineen told reporters in the capital Juba.

 “We will have a total of 179,520 doses of AstraZeneca that we received and 750,000 doses of Johnson and Johnson,” he said.

“We continue to request that people be vaccinated – and from the media side, from all of us, let us put a positive story up there that positive benefits of vaccination are clear.”

The vaccine doses used in South Sudan are the double shots Oxford AstraZeneca and the single dose Johnson and Johnson.

The donations come mainly from the Covid-19 Vaccines, the Global Access initiative (Covax), and the government of the United States of America.

By Sunday, 177, 542 people were fully vaccinated in the country and the total of doses administered is 263, 939 –both from AstraZeneca and the –single-dose Johnson and Johnson vaccine.

As of 11th December, South Sudan had 12,891 cumulative numbers of Covid-19 cases, and 133 covid-19 related deaths, as reported by the Public Health Emergency Operation Centre (PHEOC) in the National Ministry of Health.