November 03, (THEWILL) –Â Health officials in Georgia on Wednesday sounded the alarm over the slow pace of coronavirus vaccinations, after some 17,000 doses of expired AstraZeneca vaccines were destroyed.
Georgia, with a total population of 3.7 million people, is being devastated by new wave of the pandemic despite vaccines being widely available.
With 6,024 new infections on Wednesday, the country has reported nearly 733,000 cases and more than 10,000 deaths.
“The government has made available a wide choice of internationally approved Covid-19 vaccines, but the rollout has slowed significantly since the summer. As a result, we were forced to destroy 17,000 expired AstraZeneca vaccines”, Deputy director of Georgia’s National Centre for Disease Control, Paata Imnadze told newsmen
If the trend is not reversed, “we will soon face… a sharp increase in mortality,” he added.
The Finance Ministry had in September launched a lottery in which cash prizes are awarded to both partially and fully vaccinated people. But many health professionals have criticised the government’s efforts as insufficient.
“There was practically no information campaign to raise awareness about the vaccination’s importance and safety”, the head of the critical medicine department at the Tbilisi-based New Hospital, Vakho Kaloyan, lamented.
Only a third of Georgia’s population has been vaccinated with at least one dose since the country began a national coronavirus vaccine drive in March.
Georgia received a donation of some 43,000 doses of AstraZeneca through the UN’s mechanism for vaccine distributions, Covax, as well as 500,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine from the United States.
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