The Minister of Health, Kwaku Agyemang Manu has said that Ghana will continue to engage middlemen to some extent in the procurement of Covid-19 vaccines.
Speaking at a Press briefing on 16th June 2021, he said the country had to utilize people who claimed they had authority to sell vaccines for Russia.
“Whatever it is, we may have to procure and so far as we are getting bilateral engagements to do, we wouldn’t have options than to continue to engage middlemen to some limited extent,” the Health Minister stated.
The use of middlemen in procuring Covid-19 vaccines at $19 instead $10 per dose on the international market by the country has attracted massive criticisms from the general public since a Norwegian tabloid that Ghana was shortchanged by the middlemen.
However the Health Minister says efforts to engage the Russian government bilaterally didn’t yield any response.
“We had to write to the Foreign Minister of Russia, we wrote to the Health Minister of Russia, we wrote to the Trade Minister of Russia, trying to see how best they can facilitate us to do bilateral engagements so we could buy Sputnik from the source.
“All these didn’t yield any responses and no significant results to the extent that we even invited the Deputy Ambassador of Russia for the engagement and he couldn’t facilitate our move. We therefore had no other option than to try to engage middlemen to see how best we can get the vaccines”.