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DODOMA, Tanzania (AP) – Tanzania’s health ministry said it had no plan in place to accept COVID-19 vaccines, just days after the country’s 60 million president people expressed doubts about the vaccines without providing evidence.
Health Minister Dorothy Gwajima said at a press conference in the capital, Dodoma on Monday, that “the ministry is not planning to receive COVID-19 vaccines.” All vaccines must receive ministry approval. It’s unclear exactly when vaccines might arrive, although Tanzania is eligible for the global COVAX effort to deliver doses to low- and middle-income countries.
The Minister of Health insisted that Tanzania was safe. In a presentation in which she and others were not wearing face masks, she encouraged the audience to improve hygiene practices, including the use of disinfectants but also inhaling steam – which was dismissed by health experts elsewhere as a way to kill the coronavirus.
Chief government chemist Fidelice Mafumiko has also suggested the use of herbal medicine to cure COVID-19, without providing evidence.
The Tanzanian government has been widely criticized for its approach to the pandemic. It has not updated its number of coronavirus infections – 509 – since April.
Last week, the Africa official of the World Health Organization urged Tanzania to share its infection data, while the director of the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that “if we don’t fight that as a collective on the continent, we will be doomed.
President John Magufuli, who has long claimed that God wiped out COVID-19 in Tanzania, claimed last week that vaccines for him are “inappropriate” even as the first large shipments of vaccines begin to arrive on the African continent .
But Tanzanian authorities, from the Catholic Church to government institutions, push back and tell the public and employees that COVID-19 exists in the country and precautions must be taken.
Although it is difficult to assess the level of viral infections in Tanzania, this week the main opposition party ACT Wazalendo announced that party leader Seif Sharif Hamad, vice president of the semi-autonomous island region of Zanzibar, was being treated for COVID-19.
The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in their latest travel advisory on Tanzania, says the level of COVID-19 in the country is “very high.” He gave no details but urged preventing all travel to the East African nation.
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Follow all of the PA’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
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