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Health ministry wants KCCA to account for 21,000 doses whose usage has not yet been accounted for
Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | The health ministry has directed Kampala Capital City Authority -KCCA to account for all the vaccines that it received for the COVID-19 vaccination exercise.
Uganda received 964,000 vaccine doses which were sent to different local governments. According to the health ministry, KCCA was one of the local government authorities that received the highest number of vaccines. It is estimated that over 200,000 doses were given to the authority. Now the health ministry wants it to account for the 21,000 doses.
As of Wednesday last week, data from the health ministry showed that KCCA had the highest number of unaccounted for vaccines in the country. At the time, the authority had 21,000 vaccines whose usage had not yet been accounted for.
Dr Alfred Driwale, the programme manager of the Uganda National Expanded Programme on Immunization says the vaccines in question were given to KCCA which was in charge of vaccination in Kampala.
However, there’s no data to show that the vaccines in question were used.
According to Driwale, they are yet to get a reply from KCCA on whether all the vaccines have been used or not. Each person who gets vaccinated is supposed to have their names recorded. The data is then forwarded to the health ministry’s vaccination team that updates the uptake of the vaccines from different districts.
KCCA is being asked to account for vaccines at a time when the Uganda police has launched investigations into the theft of 600 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in Kampala. As part of the investigations, 10 people have been arrested.
Those who have been arrested are alleged employees of UMC Victoria Hospital and First Pharmacy. Victoria hospital was one of the few private facilities that KCCA gave permission to carry out vaccination. It is alleged that some people paid between Shs 300,000 and 500,000 to access the vaccines that are supposed to be free of charge from some clinics within Kampala.
The director of public health and environment at KCCA, Dr Daniel Okello said that the authority had used up all the health ministry allocated vaccines. He refuted claims that that some of the unaccounted for vaccines might be some of those that were found in private clinics. It is not yet established whether some 21,000 doses were the ones allegedly being illegally sold at half a million shillings.
“We do not have any more vaccines, we are waiting for the ministry to allocate to us more as we used all that we were given,” Dr Okello said.
According to the health ministry, the next consignment of vaccines of 175,000 doses is expected to arrive on Wednesday this week. The vaccines will be used to give second doses to persons who have already received at least one dose of the vaccine.
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