The Ministry of Health has revealed that Kampala is so far among the worst performing districts when it comes to vaccinating people against Covid-19.
According to the Minister of Health Jane Ruth Aceng, unlike districts like Nakapiripiriti, Bukwo and Kaberamaido that topped the list of worst-performing districts due to problems of accessibility to the health facilities, in Kampala most people just shunned vaccinations because of some malicious propaganda against the vaccines.
In March this year, Uganda received a total of 964, 000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine of which 864,000 doses were got from the COVAX facility and 100,000 other doses were received as a donation from India.
Before rolling it out across the country, the Health Ministry started the vaccination exercise from Kampala and Entebbe. A month later, so far a total of only 330,077 people had been vaccinated in the district.
Although vaccination started from Kampala, the district is in the 14th position among the poor performing areas. Surprisingly districts like Rukungiri, Kanungu, Hoima, Rukiga, Tororo, Bushenyi, Masaka, Mukono, Pakwach and Jinja were the best performing districts, yet the vaccination started later than in Kampala.
Speaking with one of the nurses that carry out vaccination at Mengo Hospital who preferred anonymity, she noted that in Kampala the turn up has just begun to increase because of misinformation at the beginning.
“In Kampala, people have access to a lot of information from different sources and they trust it. I have even heard some important and respected individuals here asking me whether the drugs are fine.”
She said that due to the deadly pandemic variant in Indian, now the number of people going for vaccinations has started to increase.
“When Kabaka and Museveni got vaccinated it increased the number of people coming for vaccinations and due to what is happening in Indian, the number has again increased for the last two weeks and I have so far heard two people saying that they are getting vaccinated due to what is happening in Indian. I think most people living in Kampala have less trust in the right information and have put much trust in the information they get on social media than the ministry itself,” she said.
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