First, Ukraine was caught up in the geopolitics of vaccine distribution between Russia and the West, and struggled to get hold of all doses. Now that it has them, Ukraine faces a new challenge: finding enough people who want to be vaccinated.
The country is so plagued by misinformation about Covid-19 that hesitation about vaccination in Ukraine is among the worst in Europe, even among doctors and nurses.
This shows the slow start of Ukraine’s vaccination program: so far, just over 23,000 people have received the dose, out of a population of 42 million.
Ukrainian media released reports of open vaccine bottles that go to waste in hospitals because it was not possible to find doctors and nurses willing to receive the doses.
The United Nations Development Program and UNICEF released a study saying that Ukraine was suffering from an “infodemia”, with social networks “flooded with false narratives” about the disease and vaccination.
Ukraine’s tense domestic policy is partly to blame.
Opponents of President Volodymyr Zelensky extended their criticism of him to the two vaccines his administration put to use – one from Oxford-AstraZeneca and the other from Sinovac – both proven in clinical trials to be safe and effective.
A former prime minister, Yulia V. Tymoshenko, who now leads an opposition party, introduced a bill in Parliament that implicitly criticized the Zelensky government’s choices, providing that the government would indemnify Ukrainians for any side effects and “protect all Ukrainians from the negative consequences ”Of the two vaccines.
A former president, Petro O. Poroshenko, said Ukrainian health professionals refused to vaccinate because they believed the two vaccines were of low quality. He used eschatological language to describe vaccines in a speech in Parliament.
Ukrainian health minister Maksym Stepanov said in an interview that the political struggle is undermining confidence in vaccination. “Politicians contribute to people’s distrust of vaccines,” he said.
Health officials said that about a third of the country’s doctors and nurses have already been infected with the coronavirus, and the rest is divided equally between those who want to be vaccinated and those who say they have no intention of taking any of the available vaccines.
Mr. Stepanov said the widespread negative attitudes were the result of “a lot of false news spread by members of the anti-vaccination movement”.