COVID-19 vaccine: No serious adverse effects recorded in Ghana so far – Presidential Advisor

Dr. Anthony Nsiah-Asare, the Advisor to the President on Health, says Ghana has a strong monitoring system for adverse effects of the coronavirus vaccine.

These include follow-up protocols and a feedback form, Dr. Nsiah-Asare noted on the Citi Breakfast Show.

His comments were in relation to recent developments with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which Ghana is using in its vaccine rollout.

Denmark, Iceland, and Norway have suspended the use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine as the European Union’s medicines regulator investigates whether it is linked to a number of reports of blood clots.

Dr. Nsiah-Asare, however, says Ghana is “not seeing any serious adverse effects of the vaccination that we are doing”.

For persons with adverse effects, he advised that “you either go on the site [provided by the Food and Drugs Authority] if you have any reactions, or you report to where you took the injection”.

He also noted that some pharmacies had forms from the FDA to record adverse effects.

Dr. Nsiah-Asare added that the FDA has “a committee that looks at the causality and the possible causes; if it is related to the vaccines and all sorts of things.”

He further urged calm over the reports of blood clots from Europe.

“What is happening in some of the European countries has not been connected directly to the vaccination… Normally, if it is not directly connected, you don't stop it. You just continue.”

The Head of the Global Research Centre at the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research in Tropical Medicine, Dr. John Amoasi, also said there was no cause for alarm in Ghana.

“By any means, we should continue with the vaccination in our country but what we need to do is to continue what we have been doing; to monitor.”

—citinewsroom