Ghana pushes community vaccine drive as pandemic fears wane

Wearing a yellow vest bearing the inscription “Vaccinator,” Doretta Konney moves residence-to-residence together with her team inside the densely populated fishing network of Chorkor in Ghana’s capital Accra.

Konney is a part of an on-the-ground push to reach Covid-19 immunization targets in Ghana — an assignment that includes triumphing over vaccine sceptics at a time when the pandemic is fading from global headlines.

The World Health Organization (WHO) last month said Africa’s coronavirus vaccination uptake had multiplied 15 percent way to mass vaccination drives.

For Konney, a community nurse, the work means visiting close to 50 households daily to vaccinate between 20 and 40 individuals as Ghana seeks to inoculate 20 million out of a population of 31 million.

“We face a lot of challenges,” Konney told AFP.

“Most of the people do not want to vaccinate because they have heard of…side effects.”

Educating people that Covid remains a risk is a key part of the strategy, she said.

Abigail Otokunor, a 25-year-old student who had her first shot when Konney visited her mother’s shop, said she had been sceptical until the mobile vaccination team changed her mind.

“I just didn’t want to take it because I was scared of the side effects,” Otokunor told AFP.

Vaccine uptake in Africa is worryingly low, say experts.

The WHO last month said the continent had fully vaccinated just 15 percent of its adult population. And of the 714 million doses that had been received so far, just 61 percent had been administered.

Only Mauritius and Seychelles have surpassed 70 percent vaccination coverage. Fifteen countries have still to fully vaccinate even 10 percent of their population.

As for Ghana, 24.5 percent of the target population (22.9 million people) has been fully vaccinated, the GAVI vaccine alliance says.

The country has documented over 160,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus, of which 1,445 were fatal.

In Chorkor, coordinator Christiana Odei said the door-to-door drive had reached out to many inhabitants who were vaccine-hesitant.

“About 75 percent of the community people have taken their first dose now,” Odei said.

Early concerns about vaccine shortages have eased, said Aichatou Cisse, the senior country manager for Ghana at GAVI.

“African countries can get vaccines to protect Africans, so we’re on a good path,” Cisse said.