Dr. Anthony Nsiah-Asare, the Presidential Advisor on Health, has indicated that in the procurement process of vaccines for the coronavirus, the government is making every effort to avoid the use of middlemen.

He said that this is necessary to avoid the instances of such people adding extra charges to the vaccines they are trying to procure for the country, as a way of cutting down cost.

Dr. Nsiah-Asare had indicated earlier that government was procuring additional vaccines directly from other manufacturers, in addition to the consignment it was receiving from India as part of the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access Facility (COVAX) which Ghana, among 92 countries, has signed unto.

Ghana has already taken delivery of the first 600,000 doses from COVAX, making it the first African country to do so, a situation Dr. Nsiah-Asare attributes to Ghana's robust immunization regime, which UNICEF corroborated.

"We are one of the highest outtakes of immunization in the whole world... we are immunization 93% of children. The children in this country are taking about 13 different vaccines and Ghana has decentralized our immunization system and we are actively immunizing people, we have the logistics and we have a robust system in place and this is the reason why, and I heard the UNICEF Chief Executive saying that that is one of the reasons why they chose Ghana to be the first to get the COVAX," he said.

But, speaking on Ghana's plan to receive the second batch of combined vaccines from COVAX (free vaccines) and some of the ones the Ghana government is directly financing, he said that they will do so with the avoidance of all forms of middle men.

“Vaccines from different manufacturers are at different costs. The Ghana government wants to buy directly, as much as possible, from the source, so that we are not going to use a lot of middle men who will put prices here and there all sorts of things. So, we’ll get the vaccines at the right cost especially using the African medicine supply platform, they know the costs and even trying to beat the cost from the manufacturers down a bit,” he said.

He made these known on JoyNews on Saturday, February 27, 2021.