Kenya off the mark on WHO Covid-19 vaccination targets

Covid-19 jab

A health worker prepares to administer Covid-19 vaccination. 

Photo credit: Evans Habil | Nation Media Group

Kenya is still far from attaining the World Health Organisation (WHO) vaccination target of 70 per cent of the population by mid this year.

The Health ministry’s Covid-19 vaccine deployment task force says vaccine apathy is to blame for the low numbers.

In an advisory on vaccination targets for Africa in February this year, the WHO and partners said that Africa needed to accelerate its Covid-19 vaccination efforts six-times more than what they were doing to reach the target by June this year.

At the time, there were about 21 per cent Kenyans who had been fully vaccinated and the country was recording low Covid-19 positivity rates signalling the end of the fifth wave that had been caused by the Omicron variant. Four months later, 31 per cent of the population is now fully vaccinated, an addition of 10 per cent but still below the target.

Positivity rates

Dr Willis Akhwale, chairperson of the National Task Force on Covid-19 Vaccine Deployment, yesterday said the low Covid-19 positivity rates recorded over the last four months have contributed to vaccine hesitancy.

“If people don’t see the disease, they believe that there is no need for vaccination. We have been vaccinating about 5,000 people in a day which was quite low. In the past two weeks however, the numbers have shot up three times, we are now vaccinating about 15,000 people in a day,” Dr Akhwale told the Nation yesterday.

The task force will meet today to discuss future plans and set new local targets for the Covid-19 vaccination exercise.

Public health specialist Dr Richard Ayah, who is also a member of the vaccine task force, told the Nation yesterday that, despite the vaccination rates plummeting, most of the key targeted populations have received the jab.

“We have vaccinated most of the older people and those with underlying conditions. We now need to attract the remaining populations which mostly consist of the younger people,” said Dr Ayah. Data from the Health ministry as of June 8, shows that only 6.7 per cent of Kenyans aged 15 to 18 years have been fully vaccinated.

The country had targeted to vaccinate 50 per cent of that category, which is about 2.9 million teenagers, by the end of this month.

By the end of the year, the Health ministry’s targets to vaccinate the entire teenage population of 5.8 million.

While in other parts of the world children below the age of five have started receiving the Covid-19 jab, Kenya is yet to include that in its rollout plan.

More than a year after the country rolled out the vaccine, Dr Ayah says people still need to be sensitised on vaccination as some have still been trapped by the web of myths and misconceptions regarding the vaccine.

Some counties such as Tana River, Lamu, Samburu and Isiolo still have very low uptake of the Covid-19 vaccines. When counties like Nairobi have over a million people who have been fully vaccinated and more than 100, 000 who have taken the booster shot, Tana River residents who have been fully vaccinated are only 16, 156.

Dr Ayah says the disparity in the two could be because of the difference in the health systems available in such counties.