Prime
Lessons from the immunisation drive
What you need to know:
- The issue: Vaccination
- Our view: This experience vindicates the need for government to always carry out sensitisation about such programmes.
Government has just concluded a measles-rubella mass vaccination, immunising millions of children aged 15 and below to protect them from the infections. It has been largely a successful campaign that will hopefully protect Uganda’s young generation that constitutes nearly half of the country’s population against the deadly measles and related infections.
However, the vaccination exercise was not without impediments. Some people, whether intentionally or out of ignorance, spread misleading information on social media and other information platforms, which undermined the national exercise and frustrated the full realisation of the expected outcomes.
Misguided by this false propaganda, many parents shunned the immunisation and denied their children the chance to be vaccinated, thus leaving them vulnerable to measles and rubella infections.
For this reason, the exercise which had initially targeted about 18 million children, had by the second last day of the immunisation campaign on Tuesday, covered about 13 million. It was not readily established whether by end of the last day yesterday, all the targeted children had been immunised. But it is unlikely that the remaining millions of children were all vaccinated in the last day given the negative campaigns against the exercise by unscrupulous individuals using unfounded and unscientific fear-mongering messages.
There is freedom of speech or expression, but there is absolutely no freedom to deliberately or recklessly spread false information to sabotage or undermine legitimate programmes of national and public interest.
Such people are a threat to national development as they endanger the health of the country’s population. Government should investigate all cases of sabotage and prosecute the offenders who denied innocent children the right to good health.
One of the ways could be to ask every homestead to produce the immunisation cards for all the immunisable children. Those found without the cards should be tasked to explain why they don’t. It’s possible there are children who did not get immunised for some legitimate reasons probably the parents were sick or they were simply practically unable to attend. But these should be exceptional.
Those who cannot explain their failure to take their children for vaccination should be exposed to the full force of the law. This will deter others from sabotaging other future such well-intended national programmes. However, this experience highlights the need for government to always carry out sensitisation about such programmes to prepare the public against such propagandists of negative messages. It will yield better results than reacting to the false propaganda.
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