Africa-Press – Uganda. Some districts have not yet started Covid-19 vaccination using the Chinese-made Sinovac vaccines that the government has ring-fenced for teachers, Daily Monitor established.
The delay in vaccine rollout comes about one week after the National Medical Stores said it had dispatched the vaccines to districts.
Dr Patrick Odong, the district health officer for Amuru, said they would roll out the vaccines to designated centres on Friday.
“We are organising ourselves because you know the teachers are going to be vaccinated in only two locations. We are using this time to pass this information to them,” he said.
Amuru is one of the districts in the country that has been hit hard by the pandemic. Dr Odong said they received 1,539 doses of Sinovac and 1,784 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines.
The Ministry of Health in an agreement with the Education ministry ring-fenced 300,000 doses of Sinovac for teachers and support staff to boost access so as to allow quick and safe reopening of schools. The ministries have also designated school-based vaccination centres in each district. The government has pegged the reopening of schools on sufficient vaccination and warned that teachers who are not vaccinated will be blocked when schools reopen.
Teachers, who had already received the first dose of AstraZeneca, will not be eligible for Sinovac because there is still no evidence to allow mixing of the two vaccines, according to the Health ministry. They will be vaccinated with AstraZeneca.
Mr Emmanuel Ainebyoona, the Health ministry spokesperson, in a tweet on Sunday said: “More 128,000 doses of the AstraZeneca Vaccine arrive tonight from the government of Norway under the dose-sharing arrangement [Covax].”
As of August 23, a total of 170,234 teachers had received their first jab and up to 61,848 had been fully vaccinated with two doses. The government is targeting to vaccinate 550,000 teachers in the country.
Dr Paul Bishop Drileba, the DHO of Arua, said plans were ongoing to dispatch the vaccines. “We are going to dispatch them today (yesterday) to the facilities that are handling those [vaccination] sites. We got 5,341 doses of Sinovac and 3,840 of Astrazeneca,” he said.
Dr Mathias Lugoloobi, the district health officer for Wakiso, said they have started vaccination of teachers. “We have started the exercise using Sinovac. We received 21,521 doses of Sinovac and 12,608 of Astrazeneca,” he said.
