A consignment of 530,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s Covishield vaccine from the governments of Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Germany will arrive in Ghana via the COVAX facility today, Wednesday, October 6.

The donation is towards Ghana’s agenda of vaccinating 20 million adult citizens by the end of 2021.

The shipment is expected in the country on board a KLM flight KL 589 on October 6, 2021, at 1955 hours at the Kotoka International Airport, a statement issued by the German Embassy in Accra and copied to the Ghana News Agency, said on Tuesday.

Germany’s portion of the upcoming delivery is 386,400 doses, bringing the number of vaccines she had made available to Ghana to almost 2.3 million.

Complementary to the vaccines, Germany had also provided equipment, including a full Intensive Care Unit, for the Efia Nkwanta Regional Hospital in Takoradi, 45 ventilators and 5,000 pulse oximeters for several hospitals in Ghana, and support to the laboratories at the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research (KCCR) and the Noguchi Memorial Institute.

It has also provided some personal protective equipment, including 470,000 face masks, and nutritious meals for frontline healthcare workers, amongst others.

In total, Germany’s bilateral support to Ghana amounts to more than 25 million Euros, excluding the vaccines.

Currently, the German Epidemic Preparedness Team (SEEG) is providing theoretical and practical trainings in next-generation sequencing of viruses as well as bioinformatics analyses at the KCCR to enable Ghana to identify potential new Corona virus variants of concern.

The bilateral assistance to Ghana complements Germany’s contribution to the Access to Covid-19 Tools–Accelerator (ACT-A) distribution platform, of which Germany is the second-largest donor, providing 2.2 billion Euros.

In addition to its financial contribution to COVAX, Germany will pass on 100 million doses, primarily to countries in transition and developing countries, 90 per cent of which will be distributed through the COVAX vaccine platform.