Zimbabwe: Need more incentives to vaccinate

Zimbabwe’s preliminary Covid-19 vaccination target is 10 million people, using 20 million doses, to achieve the lowest estimate of herd immunity, although this target may well need to be increased by significantly considering the likelihood of new variants and the need to vaccinate adolescents.

It was hoped that this total could be reached by the end of the year, with supply chains that were secured in July and the growing capacity of immunization teams from that time on to cope with more and more. more people showing up every day.

Unfortunately, more and more people do not show up and last week only 75,000 showed up for their first dose, and therefore entered the program, with the number of newcomers declining continuously and steadily since the third week of the week. ‘August, when 265,333 joined the queues for their first shot.

Eventually, those who queue for their first injection return, even if some are a week or two late, so that their second injection is fully vaccinated. .

Right now, with just over 3.1 million Zimbabweans having their first injection and just over 5.4 million of the more than 12 million doses delivered, we are quite behind our targets.

At this point we should be giving at least three times as many jabs each week and if the demand was there we should be managing four times.

The problem is that people are reluctant to come forward. We have the vaccine doses in stock, with our first shipment last week, well over 900,000 doses, from the Covax facility set up to help developing countries secure supplies, although Zimbabwe either one of the few African countries ready and able to buy its own was already assured of the supply.

The Ministry of Health and Child Welfare has allocated a lot of additional staff to the immunization program and opened it up to licensed private practitioners and pharmacies, which, unlike the public system, are allowed to charge a fee. ‘minimal run for the free vaccine of about $ 400.

Most of the offers in this service charge between US $ 3 and US $ 5 converted at the going rate.

While all vaccines are free, and most are distributed free of charge at public hospitals, clinics, and vaccination points, those who really don’t want to stand in line can pay a pittance to get vaccinated on demand. So there really is no reason for anyone to wait.

With the assumption by the government of the personnel of the urban clinics of the municipalities, a bottleneck will be eliminated. Some board nurses have kept the number they are ready to inject every day very low, in part due to a glaring understaffing, admittedly.

But with vacancies being filled in urban clinics and staff paid on time, we assume that many more people can get immunized each day.

Everyone reads anti-vaccination messages on social media, and a constant stream of fake data is the death rate from vaccines. The real numbers in Zimbabwe show them to be a lie. There were 96 side effects of the 5.4 million doses that required medical attention, or 0.0018 percent.

More importantly, a maximum of two people may have died from the vaccine. Four people died shortly after being vaccinated, and medical authorities have obviously been very careful to investigate them.

The first two turned out to be a coincidence, that is, the vaccination had nothing to do with death. In other words, they would be dead anyway. These were people suffering from an untreated chronic disease.

The other two are still under investigation. This is not an instant process as it involves reviewing the person’s medical history and the specific symptoms presented, followed by the autopsy results.

They too may have died by chance. But even if the side effect of vaccination was a factor, two in over 5 million, that’s a tiny, very tiny percentage. They were more likely to be killed if they had been in a kombi rather than standing in line.

Besides the 96, there were others who felt unwell for a few hours or a day, nothing dramatic or in need of medical attention, although most of them reasonably made the phone call to reassure themselves. .

But again, almost everyone who has been vaccinated hasn’t even felt this discomfort.

One of the reasons for the very low percentage of side effects is the type of vaccine selected. Zimbabwe has opted for inert vaccines for several reasons.

These were available because Chinese suppliers were ready to sell them to us and the Chinese government, unlike some countries including the United States, was ready to allow exports.

But inert vaccines are also inherently safer than the live vaccines so common in Europe and the Americas. Live vaccines are a genetically modified version of a harmless virus, one actually being a chimpanzee virus, the genetic engineering being the splicing of part of the Covid-19 virus into the vaccine virus.

The vaccinated person is then infected with this virus modified to generate the antibodies. Inert vaccines use the protein layer of the real virus, without any viruses, to cause the body to generate antibodies.

The only reason some companies switched to a live vaccine was that they are generally more effective, although studies show that with Covid-19 this benefit is very small.

A final reason for using inert vaccines is that they can be stored and carried in the kind of refrigerators and bags that we already have everywhere for that collection of vaccines that we give to all the children. We didn’t have to buy the ultra-cold freezers needed for most live vaccines.

Some private health experts want the government to do more to encourage people to queue. It is difficult to see what more can be done.

Free vaccines administered for free with all heads of government from President Mnangagwa to the queue near the start to show how sure a good start it was.

The government then ruled that all civil servants must be vaccinated by the end of next week, or face suspension without pay and possible disciplinary action.

The fact that there was no sudden increase in vaccination suggests that most were either already fully vaccinated or just waiting for a second injection. Many companies also encourage staff to get vaccinated, but then again, most have been done.

The reluctance appears to be in the informal sectors, although special efforts to vaccinate vendors in major markets have been successful.

But maybe we need something like allowing vendors a little more legal freedom to operate as long as they can produce their certificate, and harshly attacking the unvaccinated, could make our streets safer.

Victoria Falls did so by pushing for collective immunity.

The current rates aren’t that bad, but they could be so much better and until the reluctant lines up, the vaccinated aren’t as safe as they could be. The pressure must therefore continue.