Close to 20,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines were administered during Samoa’s two-day nation wide lockdown.
Health Director Leausa Dr Take Naseri says these are preliminary numbers and the results of the two day lockdown takes Samoa’s first dose to 93% or 113,771 people while the percentage of those fully vaccinated is now 47% or 56,802 people.
The nation-wide lockdown required all citizens to stay home, while 41 vaccination teams in Savaii and 113 in Upolu were deployed to administer first and second doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Samoa’s eligible population.
When Samoa’s vaccination campaign against the global coronavirus pandemic was launched in April, the Director General announced Samoa’s target number eligible population to be 133,000.
The preliminary number of 19,567 doses administered over the two day lockdown falls short of the 28,000 – 30,000 initially announced as the target for the two days.
Chair of Samoa’s National Emergency Operation Centre (NEOC) Agafili Tomaimano Shem Leo says Samoa aims to achieve herd immunity which is 99% of those eligible.
On the results of the past two days Agafili says 19,567 doses is a huge achievement over two days.
Over 100,000 of Samoa’s vaccine batches will expire on the 12th of November, seven weeks from now, while the remaining batches expire on the 30th of November as confirmed by Dr Baoping Yang, Representative of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Samoa.
According to Health Director Leausa Dr Take Naseri the total for Day 1 was 11,497 doses, while the total for Day 2 was 8,070.
Leausa said there were issues with data collecting officers running out of phone credit, and this blocked them from accessing online services to send through the information.
“They ran out of data so they went back to pen and paper”.
“There is also a lot of data cleaning to do as there were many challenges,” said Leausa.
Leausa said these included misrecordings of information such as village names.
“For example, Lotofaga and Lotofagā or the village of Vailoa where there is a Vailoa Faleata and a Vailoa in Savaii,” he said.
No adverse effects of the AstraZeneca vaccine have been recorded since Samoa started the programme in April this year according to Leausa.
It has also been announced that Samoa plans to bring in the Pfizer vaccine for children between 12 and 18 years of age.
