The Ministry of Health says health workers vaccinating the masses with Covid-19 vaccines have challenges administering the second doses because most people hardly remember which vaccine they were initially given.
This has largely been attributed to a mix of vaccines circulating in the country. These include AstraZeneca, Mordena, Sinovac, Pfizer/BioNtech and Johnson & Johnson single dose vaccines, some of which have not yet been deployed.
According to Dr Misaki Wayengera, a member of the COVID-19 Scientific Advisory Committee, health workers have reported that upon turning up for their second doses, most people cannot tell which one they were given.
He says this has been worsened by the inability on the part of the government, to align data in the field in a timely manner to the online information system, hosted at the Ministry of Health for clarification.
He explains that most names of vaccinated persons have not yet been entered into the data system, which compels health workers to rely on uninformed people for vaccines they first received.
”some of the people cannot even tell which vaccine they were given initially simply because the drive to vaccinate other people that have been vaccinated has not been well matched with the data capture ,as a result you find people who have been vaccinated are not in the system so you have to depend on their reporting in terms of what vaccine they received during the first dose and those are issues we are trying to address.”he said
Statistics from the MOH reveal that by Monday this week, 2.8 million doses of the vaccines had been administered, with less than a million people having been fully vaccinated.
Overall, the country has procured 18 million doses of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, but only 657,600 doses have so far arrived in the country.
