Ghana is expected to receive about 16.9 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine.

This was revealed by the Director-General of the Ghana Health Service, Dr. Patrick Kuma-Aboagye at the launch of the new website of the Service on Friday.

The Ghana Health Service started the vaccination exercise with the 177,600 doses of Johnson & Johnson vaccine received on August 7, in selected hotspots within the Greater Accra and the Ashanti Regions on Friday, August 13.

Dr. Patrick Kuma-Aboagye explained that this consignment of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is part of the first batch from the Africa Union’s African Vaccine Acquisition Trust (AVAT).

“This is just the first of many tranches that will be coming in. This is a vaccine that is being shared across the world. We know that for the J & J, our stock of what we have secured is about 16.9 million doses.

“They’d be coming from time to time and very soon we’d get a few more tranches,” he told JoyNews.

He said the Service is keen on targeting persons at higher risk of contracting the virus with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

According to him, “we’re now also trying to look at how to break our transmission and that is why we’re still focusing on Accra and Kumasi [because] for those in the communities where we have high transmission, we want to protect them.”

“We are targeting all the population based on the segmentation that we have. We focus initially on the people who are vulnerable, over aged,” he added.

Meanwhile, Dr. Kuma-Aboagye hinted that government would take delivery of AstraZeneca vaccines early September.

“Early next month, we will have AstraZeneca for the second dose. The arrival of the vaccines does not depend only on the Ghana Health Service but it depends on the supplier, availability of transportation to bring it in here.

“When all those things are put in place, we’d get to know the date of arrival. We should have AstraZeneca next month,” he revealed.