Member of Parliament for Nhyiaeso, Stephen Amoah
Member of Parliament for Nhyiaeso, Stephen Amoah, has said his colleague lawmaker for Juaboso, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh has been engaging in propaganda with his comments on the government’s fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
He said Akandoh has not been able to provide facts and figures to support his claim that the Covid situation in Ghana is out of hands.
Akandoh had said the government’s fight against the coronavirus pandemic has not been the best. He asked the government to up its game in dealing with the situation because the country is not out of difficulty yet.
He told journalists in Parliament on Thursday, November 25 that “The attitude of government points to the fact that they are not serious to combat Covid-19. We must know we are not out of the woods of Covid yet. In fact, some countries are returning to lockdown.”
On Wednesday, November 24 while speaking on the floor of Parliament, Mr. Akandoh noted that the government had failed to meet its own target of vaccinating the targeted population.
Mr. Akandoh said the government had so far managed to inoculate 2.5million people as of October 2021, a figure that is against the target of 17 million people for the same period.
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo had said during his address at the 76th Session of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, September 22 that Ghana was working to reach the target of vaccinating twenty million people by the end of 2021.
“Five million is not a figure to be sneered at, particularly when we consider the situation in many other African countries. We are grateful that our efforts at the management of the pandemic and vaccine distribution have been recognised, and we have received these amounts so far. We are still hoping to vaccinate twenty million of our people by the end of the year,” he said.
President Akufo-Addo continued, “Ghana agrees with the call of the Rome Declaration of Global Health for voluntary licensing and technology transfers to boost vaccine production. The Africa Union is working with WHO, WTO, and other global partners to expand its vaccine manufacturing and deployment.”
But Mr. Akandoh who is also the Minority spokesperson on Health said “Mr. Speaker, it is a fact that as a country we have failed to vaccinate our people on time to meet the herd immunity.
“Mr. Speaker, I say so because the government presented to us a vaccination plan, and this document is titled ‘ Covid-19 vaccination deployment and vaccination plan”.
According to this document on page 29 we were supposed to have vaccinated about a 1.5million people between April and June 2021. Again, from June to August we were supposed to have vaccinated about 6.3million. Between September to October we should have about a 9.5million people. At this time we should have vaccinated not less than a 17million people.
“Ironically, if you refer to the 2022 budget we have vaccinated only 2.5million. Per their own marking scheme, 2.5 divided 17 is an obvious fail.”
Responding to Akandoh in an interview with the media in Parliament, Stephen Amoah said “My brother or Ranking Member on the Health Committee should have brought figures and say look at the figures, the mortality rate is going up, the infection rate is going up, we are getting to a worse situation.
“He could not provide anything of this sort only to come and propagate, in my opinion, just propaganda. In any case, our government is on course, we want to tread cautiously but effectively manage the situation. For diseases nobody knows, there could even be other factors.
“So far as we are concerned I can assure you even analysing the independence variables of the disease to redefine a new framework going forward whenever there is a pandemic or endemic, probably some of the errors of the mortality rate we had, which even defines Ghana as one of the best managers of the situation, we would do even better.”