Some 1,050 Ghanaians who took the AstraZeneca jab as of March 16 have developed side effects.

430,000 to 450,000 had been vaccinated as of March 16, 2021, out of which it has been discovered that nearly 1,030 to 1,050 people are found to have side effects.

This revelation comes in the wake of fears that individuals who took the jab have complained of developing blood clots but Ghana’s Food and Drugs Authority, FDA on Thursday downplayed these reports.

Dr. Kwame Amponsah- Achiano, the Manager of the programme at the Expanded Programme on Immunization at the Ghana Health Service, who revealed this on the 3FM Sunrise Morning Show, however, said the Ghana Health Service would prefer to call these side effects as adverse events.
“We would be confident when you say adverse events because not all events following immunization are due to the vaccines so generally, we call them events.

“So we have had nearly 1,030 and 1,050 events supporting, again, these are risks in compared with the number of people vaccinated and it is approximately, 268-300 events per 100,000 people vaccinated. In other words for every 100,000 persons who have been given the vaccine we have had 300 reports”.

According to him, Ghana is not doing badly in respect of the reported adverse events.

“These are mainly diarrhoea headache, fever, pain at the injection side and hunger. People are complaining that they are sleeping too much, others too say they didn’t sleep too well so a range of these mild adverse events are the ones we have discovered so far and we are still monitoring and FDA is in the driving seat”.

So far, the country has done 60% of the targeted vaccination as of March 17, 2021.