Data from the World Health Organization, WHO has revealed that only 8 percent of the over 4,000 health workers in Anambra State, has completed their COVID-19 vaccination series.
The State Coordinator of the WHO, Dr. Adamu Abdulnasri disclosed this during a state engagement meeting on the Canada Global Initiative for Vaccine Equity (CanGIVE) Grant, held on Tuesday in Awka.
The grant is being implemented by the WHO and National Primary Healthcare Development Agency, NPHCDA, in 15 select states of the Federation, and in the Southeast, only Anambra and Ebonyi states were selected.
The overall goal of the grant is to scale up covid-19 vaccine delivery among high priority risk groups, promote community engagement, within the context of addressing inequities in service delivery with focus on disparities in gender and specific sub-national geographical locations.
The identified priority groups targeted under the grant which will last for three months are health workers, the elderly (over 50 years), those with comobities (people with terminal diseases) and pregnant women.
At the engagement meeting, participants were drawn from among critical stakeholders including religious leaders, community leaders, market leaders, medical groups, among others.
In an outline, Dr Abdulnasri, who was represented by the State WHO Technical Assistant on COVID-19 and Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response, IDSR, Truth Ezeudoye explained that Anambra and other benefitting states were selected due to their low uptake of covid-19 vaccines among priority populations.
Acknowledging the significant progress made by the state in older adult vaccination with 90 percent coverage, Dr Abdulnasri noted that the figure cannot give the state the needed herd immunity, hence the need to scale up the vaccination and coverage.
“Although the grant has high priority groups, the vaccination is for all.
“The grant looks to reduce the incidence of covid-related deaths and serious illness through improving herd immunity.
“Having understood that a major challenge is lack of vaccine confidence and vaccine hesitancy.
“The CanGIVE project therefore aims to enhance operational support to increase vaccine coverage, to support health systems strengthening to enable delivery of gender-equitable vaccine and strengthen partnership and collaboration among stakeholders
“Under this initiative, we would be targeting hard-to-reach areas and security compromised areas as well as looking to harmonize data,” he said.
Earlier in a goodwill message, the NPHCDA Coordinator in Anambra, Obioha Oku, commended the initiative and expressed the hope that it will help ramp up the numbers for the nation in terms of COVID coverage.
For his part, Dr. Placid Uliagbafusi, who is the Director, Disease Control and Immunization, at the State PHCDA, explained that the idea behind the engagement meeting is to get stakeholders’ inputs on how to extend the coverage.
He emphasized that the stakeholders must take the message down to their communities to sensitize the people on the need to uptake the vaccines, to increase vaccine acceptance and eliminate hesitancy.
Dr Uliagbafusi said although COVID is over as a global health threat, populations are still at great risk of infection.
However, a major challenge was the approval for only two teams to be supported in each LGA to provide COVID-19 vaccination.
Also speaking, Edith Onwuka, Anambra State’s Immunization Officer harped on the need for multi-stakeholder, multi-sectoral, multi-disciplinary and multi-partner mechanism for planning, financing, implementing, monitoring and evaluation of the project for better result.
