Why are doctors hesitant to get vaccinated?

“The plan is that there is no plan.” This sums up our Covid-19 vaccination drive.

The level of uncertainty which surrounds us today is bigger than when we did not have a vaccine. Now there is a vaccine but as part of a donation. There is a vaccine but in limited numbers. There is a vaccine but people are reluctant to get vaccinated. There is a vaccine but there is no plan.

We kick started our vaccination drive through text messages and automated audio tapes which played every time someone dialled a phone number. To much relief, the first to get vaccinated in Pakistan, like the rest of the world, were frontline healthcare workers. The second stage was initiated soon after which consisted of people above the age of 65. This was done when more than 60% of frontline healthcare workers remained unvaccinated.

More than a month has passed since immunisation began, but no proper system of regulating and monitoring the vaccination drive can be seen. Vaccines are being administered on the principle of free will and a clear vaccine hesitancy can be seen. Much of it is owed to Punjab’s health minister Dr Yasmin Rashid who advised people to get vaccinated at their “own risk” and stated that side effects of the vaccine have caused deaths in some countries. Many health professionals resultantly, including doctors, have opted not to get vaccinated. So far, only about 197,000 doses of the Covid-19 vaccine have been administered to our population.

The conspiracies which kept on boiling the last one year have finally erupted and harmed our vaccination efforts in the form of stigmatisation of the whole process. There is a general lack of trust in the government-led and foreign-funded health initiatives. The Chinese vaccine which we are currently using is facing the same level of distrust as it was China where the deadly coronavirus first emerged and it was China where suddenly the virus disappeared while the rest of the world kept on losing lives. Soon after, talks of China’s ache for world domination and biowarfare started. Just recently a new theory has surfaced, especially among the doctor community, that the Chinese vaccine is still under trials and those being administered are part of a larger study experiment. In light of this, the vaccine’s label “made in China” has started to make us all feel a little too edgy.

For the same reason, many Chinese manufacturers have started changing the label of their products from “made in China” to “made in PRC”. As most people are unaware that PRC stands for the People’s Republic of China, they end up buying the product. This is the same strategy used by Chinese companies to counter the growing anti-China sentiment in India.

Another reason for the bumpy start of our vaccination journey is that we are using vaccines which are given to us as donation or aid or as some might call charity. The donated Chinese vaccine holds within it a large amount of fear and stigma due to which people are unwilling to accept it, at least for now.

Islamabad has allowed a private laboratory to purchase and sell Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine to the public without any limitation in the selling price. This free hand to a private company to gain profits and lack of any completed international deal by the government to acquire more reliable vaccines such as America’s Moderna vaccine and England’s Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine reflects the desperation of the government and widens the distrust in government health policies.

After a year of devastation, hope of finally getting rid of the virus is disappearing faster than cotton candy when it is licked. The lack of will and commitment towards the vaccination programme takes us back to the previous discussion of: are we waiting for herd immunity? The current inaction says so.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 11^th, 2021.

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