By Umar Farooq
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Just over half of Pakistan’s health workers have received a COVID-19 vaccine since vaccinations started last month, while a survey released on Friday suggested that almost half have concerns about China’s Sinopharm, the only vaccine available so far.
Pakistan distributed 504,400 doses of the Sinopharm vaccine to provincial authorities by February 20, and 230,000 frontline health workers received an injection by Friday, according to Health Minister Faisal Sultan.
In January, Sultan said 400,000 health workers were registered to receive the vaccine.
A survey of 555 medical professionals conducted by Gallup Pakistan and a national association of doctors between 12 and 20 February said that 59% of health professionals have not yet received the injection.
Sinopharm is one of four vaccines approved for use by Pakistan for healthcare professionals and is currently the only vaccine available in the country of 220 million.
About 81% of healthcare professionals said they would like to be vaccinated, but 46% said they would prefer Pfizer or AstraZeneca over the Sinopharm vaccine. About 58% said that a vaccine developed so quickly could not be guaranteed to be safe.
“Chinese is a brand that is not synonymous with medical innovation,” Bilal Gilani of Gallup Pakistan told Reuters. “If Pfizer or AstraZeneca were offered, there would be much greater acceptance.”
Pfizer is an American company, while AstraZeneca is Anglo-Swedish.
Gilani said doctors do not trust government recommendations and instead look to social media for information about the vaccine.
“No doctor refuses to receive the vaccine. Some of them are waiting for Oxford, AstraZeneca,” Salman Kazmi, secretary general of the Pakistan Young Medical Association, told Lahore Reuters.
“But there are some myths and delays, which is probably why the speed of vaccination is not high.”
While preference for Western vaccines may be an obstacle in the case of COVID vaccines, polio vaccination efforts in Pakistan have had to deal with attacks by Islamic militants and conspiracy theories that the shots are a Western ploy to sterilize Muslims.
(Reporting by Umar Farooq; additional reporting by Charlotte Greenfield and Asif Shahzad in Islamabad, and Syed Raza Hassan in Karachi. Editing by Nick Macfie)