By Mabinty M. Kamara
Officials of the Ministry of Health and Sanitation and the World Health Organization have on Saturday 10th April 2021 received the first consignment of the Johnson and Johnson Ebola vaccine at the Freetown international airport.
The vaccine according to officials is to help prevent a recurrence of the devastating Ebola epidemic which claimed thousands of lives across the country.
A total of 30, 000 regimen of the vaccine is said to have been approved for Sierra Leone from the manufacturers Johnson and Johnson to protect people at high risk of the disease.
Each regimen, according to officials consists of two doses and would be given to the beneficiaries approximately eight weeks apart. The first consignment received on Saturday consists of 640 doses followed by another consignment of 3840 the following day.
Speaking at the event in Lungi, WHO’s Margret Lamunu said that as a preventive mechanism, the World Health Organization has been in touch with different partners to come up with a vaccine that can prevent the spread of the EVD virus in Sierra Leone should it strike again because of the current threat posed by neighboring Guinea.
“The vaccines developed by Johnson and Johnson can be used for prevention. And we now know that there is an outbreak of Ebola in Guinea and we know that Sierra Leone is at risk. That’s why we are making sure that we get in touch with our partners and Johnson and Johnson is the main partner to make sure that we protect the people who are at risk. So in case of any introduction, we try to mitigate and prevent it to ensure that the people are vaccinated before anything happens,” she said.
Dr. Allie Wurie the Incident Manager, Ebola Preparedness at the Ministry of Health and Sanitation told newsmen that the partnership between the government of Sierra Leone, WHO and the Johnson and Johnson leading to the approval of the vaccine for Sierra Leone is a great initiative.
“I want to inform listeners that this time round, the Ebola fight is going to be a different one from that in 2014. This time round, we have new tools that we are going to use in the fight of the EVD we have seen that work and its evidence based and that tool is the Ebola vaccine. The Ebola vaccine is going to be used to prevent the spread of Ebola even before it comes to Sierra Leone. Why we went into partnership with WHO, is because we know the vaccines have worked somewhere else,” he said.
The Vaccine according to a statement from the Ministry of Health and Sanitation dated 10th April, will target frontline healthcare workers at border districts.
“In view of the ongoing outbreak of Ebola in neighboring Guinea, frontline healthcare workers in border districts are at risk of infection, should the virus spill over to Sierra Leone. Therefore, they are the focus of this vaccination campaign,” the statement reads.
The latest Ebola outbreak in Guinea in February this year comes nearly five years after the end of the 2014-2016 West African Ebola epidemic, which also began in Guinea and spread to nine other countries across the world, including Liberia and Sierra Leone. The three MRU countries were the worst affected, as they accounted for most of the cases (nearly 30, 000) and fatalities (over 11, 000).
The 2014 outbreak entered Sierra Leone through Kailahun, which is close to Guinea’s Forest Region. According to local authorities, there are multiple illegal border crossing points between the two countries at that end which remains a major concern.
Copyright © 2021 Politico Online (12/04/21)
