The Malawi Government says despite various interventions that have been put in place to ensure that more people in the country have been vaccinated against COVID-19 pandemic, the uptake still remains very low.
Director of public health institute of Malawi under the ministry of health, Dr Benson Chilima disclosed this in Blantyre during the opening of a five-day training on activities to scale up the uptake among the African member states.
Chilima said the country still have a long way to go in order to reach the targets of achieving 70 percent of COVID-19 vaccination by June 2023.
Among other things, the director disclosed that the country has planned to increase the uptake by 30 percent by June, 50 percent by December this year and 70 percent by June next year though he was not sure if this may be achieved.
Chilima cited the growing misconceptions due to false information, social cultural and religious beliefs and poor community civic awareness as some of the attributable elements fueling the negative uptake of the vaccines.
Among other things, he said recently the government has introduced outreach interventions such as mobile clinics and door to door vaccinations but the activities were still not making a dent in scaling up the uptake.
“But this is unlikely to be achieved due to various challenges that affect our interventions. At the moment, we are at around 4 to 5 percent and we would have at least reached 12 percent by now.
“We could have put together the organised civic education campaigns to cover the large population targeting people such as chiefs, parents, children and religious leaders so as to dispel the misconceptions and that people should be aware of the basic facts about vaccinations but funding has been the deterrent factor,” said Chilima.
According to him, only Ntchisi district has achieved 10 percent target as compared to other districts in the country and further added that there should also be incentives to encourage people to get vaccinations.
“Those in authority could have introduced serious programs about the same, on television stations, radio stations, and also using all media outlets, and maximizing use of journalists to help passing information to masses, as a way of solving the problems,” he added.
However, the doctor said since the country is registering a positivity rate of under one percent of COVID-19 cases, there would be a challenge to convince people to get vaccinated.
According to Chilima, since the country launched vaccination exercise in March last year, the Malawi government has received over 4 million doses of vaccines that include; Johnstone and Johnson (JJ), AstraZeneca and Pfizer.
Since the start of the vaccination exercise in Malawi, 1,135,654 people have received their first doses, 415 have received booster doses, while 863,025 people have been fully vaccinated.
In an interview, technical officer on COVID-19 response for Africa center for disease and prevention (CDC) Yaya Kande said Malawi needs to pull up sock in scaling up the COVID-19 vaccine uptake so as to cope up with other African countries.
“There is need for a comprehensive plan on a working tools for the next three years so as to increase the numbers. The country needs to explore ways on what is making the interventions not to reach the targets. As CDC, we are ready to support the planned activities in terms of various resource support,” he said.
The training was organized by Africa centre for disease control and prevention in partnership with the master card foundation and the ministry of health.
