Health Minister, Dr. Frank Anthony has debunked the opposition’s claims that the government seeking $1.3B in supplementary funds, mere months after the presentation of an over $300B Budget, is tantamount to economic mismanagement. Responding to questions about approval of the sums already spent on purchasing 300,000 Sputnik V and 100,000 Sinopharm vaccines, Dr. Anthony told the House that the undetermined cost of vaccines and suppliers, prevented the government from stating definitively, the monies that would be expended.
“Because we didn’t budget adequate sums of money under this line item is not mismanagement…We could not include if we did not know the source and price. By no stretch of the imagination, this is mismanagement…The cost was not known [and] now that we know and we’ve gone ahead and acquired these vaccines, we’ve included it now,” he said.
The Minister further explained that during the budget’s formulation and subsequent presentation, vaccine scarcity was prevalent. It is this scarcity that led the Guyana Government to ‘direct source’ vaccines, noting that suppliers, Moderna and Pfizer, could only provide jabs to Guyana till 2022.
