Despite global health gurus generally vouching for the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines, communities across Africa are taking the Covid jabs with a pinch of salt.
Since the turn of the new year most African countries have joined the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access, abbreviated as COVAX.
The global scheme to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines by poor and wealthier countries has seen billions of doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines being distributed to more and more African countries.
However, this growing access has been met with question marks over the real purpose of the vaccine in Africa where many people hold fast to theories which could undermine the mass inoculation campaigns already well underway on the continent.
Before the vaccines reached Africa’s shores, the Africa Centres for Disease Control conducted a survey in 18 countries on the continent last December.
The result was not encouraging to vaccine apologists as only a quarter of respondents said Covid-19 vaccines would be effective and safe.
By then the vaccine denialists were few and far between according to the survey but months into the new year, this may be changing.
Some eight European countries have suspended the use of the Covid-19 vaccine over fears of blood clot side effects.
Ireland, Denmark, Austria, Bulgaria, Iceland, Italy and Norway are among the countries to have put their use of the vaccine on hold until it is medically proven that the clots are unconnected to the Covid jabs.
Assurances from the World Health Organization that there is no established connection between the vaccines and reported blood clots may do little to dispel public fears in some African communities about “what lurks behind the vaccine”.
Taking a cue from this European caution, public opinion about the vaccine has been so strong in the Democratic Republic of Congo that the government has suspended its immunisation campaign until it could sufficiently vouch for the efficacy of the doses.
DRC which had acquired some 1.7 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine is the first country in the continent to exercise “cautious pragmatism”.
Even in South Africa, the hardest hit country on the continent, which is hoping to vaccinate 40 million people against Covid-19, vaccine scepticism is high.
Health workers of all people are caught in this “sea of scepticism” after the Indaba nurses union advised its 17,000 members not to take the vaccine.
The results of surveys by IPSOS and CompariSure, conducted in January suggest that half of the South African population would reject the Covid vaccine jab because they do not trust it as effective and safe.
South Africa currently has 1.53 million cases, in which 1.46 million have recovered and 51, 560 have been fatalities.
Richard Mihigo, the WHO’s vaccination coordinator for Africa, says although the past record of the continent with vaccines bodes well for Covid-19 inoculation campaigns, the myths, misconceptions, conspiracy theories and tendency for Africans to be sceptical of things outside their immediate world are a real challenge to deal with.
The health community cannot afford to be in denial about this, he warns.
Perhaps a reflection of the extent of this challenge is in Uganda, where the president appears reluctant to be inoculated.
Despite thousands of health workers already vaccinated in his country, President Yoweri Museveni admitted he is still undecided over taking the jab even as his peers in Nigeria, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea and South Africa did so publicly to stem the tide of scepticism already being noticed in their countries.
Museveni’s compatriots have even mocked his apparent hesitance as thinly-veiled rejection of the vaccine borne out of a deep unspoken distrust of its effectiveness.
In The Gambia where Covid immunization began with the country’s leader and his cabinet taking the jab publicly earlier in March, whole families say they will not be following in President Adama Barrow’s footsteps.
“Those administering the vaccine will not be allowed into my compound because I and members of my family are not interested in the immunisation” says white-bearded Ba Foday Jitteh (not his real name), a father of eight in the coastal town of Brufut.
Aja Kaddy, his 15-year old daughter agrees: “We can’t trust this vaccine after hearing stories about it causing infertility in women in other countries”.
In Nigeria, the distrust for vaccines runs a long way into the past.
The use of a Pfizer meningitis vaccine test run ended in tragedy for 11 children in 1996 and brought hostility to health workers involved in immunisation campaigns especially in the north of the country.
Speaking to Nigeria’s Premium Times, Daniel Ogala, a tailor living and working in Abuja, asserts that the vaccines are a Western invention to keep tabs on Africans.
“When they inject you with the vaccine, a chip will be implanted inside your body and will be used to monitor you” he claims.
Experts say health authorities in Africa do not just have to deal with a pandemic but also the knowledge and communication deficits about coronavirus and the vaccines on which much of the world pins its hope to banish the respiratory illness from the face of the earth.
WN/as/APA