Vaccine shipments could expire, with low turnouts

What is noticeable is that there isn’t sufficient fear of infection with Covid-19 to push large segments of the population to go out for inoculation, partly because of the feeling that it is essentially a European disease, and attacks those who meet foreigners like in the tourism circuit in the northern regions, etc. False confidence, yes, but it is real.

As a matter of fact, the type of vaccine which was shipped earlier and used to vaccinate most of the 1.2m people vaccinated so far, namely the Janssen vaccine from Johnson &Johnson cosmetics and pharmaceutical firm, was more suited to the local situation. It was a one shot type where one goes for a jab and doesn’t have to come back later, unlike at present where the Sinopharm vaccine is a two shot type, as well as the Sinovac jab that was being administered in Zanzibar at the start of the campaign. The first type needed one to make a decision for a particular day, while the others call for consistency, repeat.

On the basis of what is happening in neighbouring countries and abroad, what may bring people to vaccinate is a vaccine mandate, which requires one to have a vaccination pass to use certain public services. In countries where intense infections in terms of hospitalisation are visibly acute, this sort of compulsion is now spreading nearly everywhere, but that isn’t the situation here. Even recently while most of Southern Africa was gasping under the Omicron variant, what took place here was mild, despite being vast and touching perhaps up to half of the adult population. Most of them are still unvaccinated.

To be sure, the vaccination drive suffers a public relations liability at the popular level because the public had learned to see Covid-19 as another disease from which we shall proceed, and many preachers say that what is really bad is the fear, not the disease. Incidentally, these aren’t arguments that appeal to the public because maybe we have low levels of education but they are spread out in most rich countries, especially among socially conservative and nationalist circles. That is squarely where the fifth phase belonged, here.

In that sense the sixth phase drive for vaccination is seen as an outward looking policy, part of an outreach effort to sort out differences with donors, as it the decision to restore right of attending classroom for girls becoming pregnant. The idea that this is just an acknowledgement of human rights, not punishing those who fall prey to some social predators is not yet grasped, and vaccination also suffers the same cultural defences or indifference. So the government needs to bring about doses in keeping with turnout to avoid expiry, as when people see real cases of infection or death they come out to vaccinate.