By Natalia Zinets and Pavel Polityuk
KYIV (Reuters) – Ukrainian medical facilities threw out some unused COVID-19 vaccines after doctors did not attend their own appointments for vaccinations, lawmakers at the ruling party said on Monday.
Ukraine has just started vaccinating its 41 million inhabitants against COVID-19 after receiving a first batch of 500,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines made in India last week, but faces a battle against vaccine skepticism that predates the pandemic.
The government has prioritized giving vaccines to medical professionals, but cited statistics that show that 47% of Ukrainians do not want the vaccine.
“It is important for us to understand how all processes are set up, why doctors refuse to be vaccinated,” said Oleksandr Korniyenko, head of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s People’s Servant party, in a televised meeting.
“This is very bad, but there is no other option … if a person does not come, it (the vaccine bottle) can be kept open for 2-3 hours, after which it must be discarded,” said the head of parliament. health committee Mykhailo Radutskyi said.
A total of 3,141 injections were administered on February 28, including just 90 injections in the last 24 hours, data from the ministry of health showed.
Health Minister Maksym Stepanov said the government is working to ensure that vaccines are not thrown away, adding that this has also happened in other countries.
He was vaccinated on television on Monday and said Zelenskiy would fire soon.
“I proved by my own example that the vaccine we were vaccinated with is an absolutely safe vaccine, it is an effective vaccine,” he said.
A significant part of the population of Ukraine, like many post-Soviet republics, has traditionally been cautious about vaccines, fearing the side effects of low-quality drugs. This distrust allowed a measles outbreak to turn into an epidemic in 2019.
COVID-19 cases increased after a lull during a severe blockade earlier this year, especially in Kiev and western Ukraine, where the government set up mobile hospitals to deal with a sharp increase in cases. Ukraine recorded 1.3 million cases, with 26,050 deaths from COVID-19 on March 1.
In the northern city of Chernihiv, only 87 of the 280 doctors agreed to be vaccinated, the city council’s secretary said in a Facebook post on February 24.
(Editing by Matthias Williams and Peter Graff)