admin
Senior Health Reporter
More than 4 million Zimbabweans have now received at least one dose of Covid-19 vaccine one year after the launch of the national programme, with Government pushing the pace of vaccine rollout to ensure infection rates and the number of deaths remain low even if there is another wave of infection.
Zimbabwe launched its national vaccination campaign on February 22 last year, making it one of the first African countries to roll out vaccines in a mass campaign
Although the numbers coming forward for vaccination has significantly slowed down, despite the supplies and necessary teams in place for far higher numbers each day, the Government is confident that the progress being made is good and the vaccinations will continue to contribute to lower Covid cases going forward.
The country’s Covid-19 response coordinator, Dr Agnes Mahomva, said a clear policy framework on the pandemic response had contributed to the good management of the disease.
She said the vaccination drive had achieved what it was supposed to over the past year.
“We are proud of the progress that we have made in the programme. The big achievement was that the Government had a clear policy and plan on the response to the Covid-19 pandemic through the vaccination programme and other prevention measures. From the onset, the Government set aside US$100 million for the procurement of vaccines and this went a long way to ensure that we were prepared,” she said.
“Even though donations came, we did not wait for those but we went out and purchased our own vaccines and this helped in our drive to vaccinate citizens.”
Zimbabwe wants to vaccinate all those aged 16 and above, almost 10 million people.
As at February 21, a total of 4 337 829 people had received their first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine while 3 370 827 have received two jabs. Another 103 483 people have received the booster shot.
This means that at least 43 percent of the targeted population has received at least one dose of the vaccine.
Vaccines help the body to develop immunity to the virus that causes Covid-19. Although the vaccines do not protect people from getting the illness, they offer a significant amount of protection against severe illness and death.
“The vaccination programme has achieved its objective in that we have not recorded as many cases and deaths as we would have. By the time we were hit by the Omicron variant during the fourth wave, we had already vaccinated a significant number of people and we didn’t register high numbers of severely ill patients. You will see that the number of cases we recorded in the fourth wave was lower than what we recorded during the other waves,” said Dr Mahomva.
She said it was important to get more people vaccinated to ensure that the country continued to record fewer cases in the future.
Although still low, there has been a slight increase in the number of new cases recorded over the past week prompting concerns that Zimbabwe could be facing a fifth wave in the near future.
Dr Mahomva however said there was no way of telling if the current trends were pointing towards a fifth wave yet.
“There is no way of predicting what this pandemic is likely to do and this is why we continue to push for the vaccination of the masses,” she added.
Online Reporter