Governments and religious leaders in Muslim-majority nations are talking to vaccine manufacturers, investigating production processes and issuing guidelines in an effort to ensure that concerns about products banned by Islam do not interfere with Covid-19 vaccinations.
On Friday, Indonesia’s high clerical council, with the largest Muslim population in the world, said China’s Sinovac vaccine is permitted by Islam, or halal. The decision came after council representatives visited Sinovac’s factory in China last year and conducted a halal audit.
Part of the challenge of launching vaccines worldwide will be to persuade enough people to take them to achieve collective immunity. In many countries, Muslims and non-Muslims, efforts must overcome security issues, suspicions and conspiracy theories, as well as religious and ethical objections.
Gelatin taken from pigs and cells created with tissue from human fetuses, which are common in vaccine production, are not halal, say Muslim scholars.
Vaccine acceptance before the coronavirus pandemic varied widely among Muslim countries, with high confidence in countries like Bangladesh and Uzbekistan, according to an opinion poll in 149 countries published in September 2020 in the medical journal Lancet. He found that of the 10 countries with the sharpest drop in confidence in vaccines during the four years to 2019, seven were predominantly Muslim: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria and Pakistan. The other three were Japan, Georgia and Serbia.