January 12, 2021
With COVID-19 vaccines roll-out, logistic issues for getting millions of doses where they need to go is becoming the next challenge.
Now, the Ministry of Health and Sports is planning to inoculate all citizens aged over 18, which makes up about 70 per cent of our country’s population, in 2021 and 2022.
Regarding the vaccination, our country will give priority to those with high-risk conditions such as medical professionals and frontline workers, in an effort to contain the infection rate and to ensure the situation returns to normalcy as soon as possible.
Getting the vaccinations for the people across the country would create good logistic management issues. It means that we should be better prepared to address issues related with logistics to ensure that we can quickly respond to unexpected situations.
The Union Minister for Health and Sports Dr Myint Htwe said in his opening remarks of the fourth coordination meeting of the COVAX National Coordinating Committee – CNCC yesterday that the committee has made good preparations to store the vaccines at the designated temperatures and to make a good logistics management system.
The national vaccination programme calls for all hands on deck to ensure the logistics of distribution, storage and delivery are effective as vaccines supplies are limited and the distribution locations will vary across the country.
We will see a first batch of immunization soon. The more people receive the vaccine, the more protected everybody will be.
We are confident that the experiences of the Ministry of Health and Sports and its health workers and experts in immunization programmes would make the coming national immunization programme against COVID-19 a success.
We have a long way to go until the majority of our citizens are vaccinated, but we should all be grateful to see the progress being made and keep the faith that a return to normalcy is on the horizon.
We must prepare now for day one of the vaccine’s availability through a comprehensive national strategy for procurement, logistics, the distribution of COVID-19 vaccine and immunization.
And, even with a vaccine, it will take time for the global and our economy to get back to pre-crisis levels.
Hence, before being vaccinated against the coronavirus, we need to be very vigilant during this period.
GNLM
