The Presidential Advisor on Health, Dr Anthony Nsiah-Asare says government is only paying for conveying and deployment of vaccines from the COVAX facility.

According to him, vaccines that will be arriving in the country in the next few weeks will be a combination of what government is buying directly from manufacturers and what it is getting free from the COVAX facility.

"Government is buying a majority of the vaccines. We are at a very advanced stage to get the ones that government is buying as well as the ones coming from Covax Facility."

He further explained that the Expanded Programme of Immunisation (EPI), Ghana Health Service (GHS), and the Health Ministry did come out with a budget to acquire 42 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines.

Speaking to Samsom Lardy Anyenini on Joy News' Newsfile Saturday, Mr Nsiah-Asare said the approved vaccines on the market are from different manufacturers which come at different prices.

"Ghana government want to buy directly as much as possible from the shores, so that we are not going to use a lot of middlemen who will put price here and there and all sort of things.

"So we’d get the vaccines at the right cost, especially using the African Medicine Supply platform. They know the cost and then most of the time, they even try to beat the cost from the manufacturers even down a bit."

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health has also authorised the registration and use of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine against the novel coronavirus.

On Wednesday Ghana received its first batch of Covid-19 vaccines through the COVAX programme.

Approximately 600,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine arrived in the country that morning.

Ghana applied for Covid-19 vaccines from the COVAX facility and the country was assigned 6 million doses.

The 600,000 doses which arrived in the country forms part of the 2.4 million doses of the first batch of Oxford-AstraZeneca the country is expected to receive.