A lot of external pressures ranging from the sights of close relatives reeling from the virus to an order by the employer or demand by the landlord for everyone residing at a place to get vaccinated.
The range of causes is wide really, but vaccination centres were recently characterized by long queues as people jostled to get vaccinated.
Reports indicate that some council clinics across the country were only vaccinating a mere number of 30 people per day due to “capacity issues.
During the last cabinet briefing, Minister of Information, Monica Mutsvangwa indicated that the cabinet has resolved on some strategies to accelerate the vaccination drive which includes extending vaccination to private clinics, increasing outreach teams for hard to reach areas, recruitment of retired nurses to participate in the vaccination process,
extension of vaccination to clinics and tertiary education institutions and also the use of non-medical staff such as data capturers to free nurses.
All the mentioned strategies will be of great use to push the number of people vaccinated to reach the 10 million herd immunity targeted by the government.
However, one strategy stood out, ‘reviewing the payment model of allowances for the vaccinators to be based on the number of people vaccinated.’
This payment model will provide nurses with the much-needed motivation to actively accelerate vaccination at select centres. Complacency by medical staff is one of the factors drawing back the vaccination programme.
With the demand for the jab still growing, the government must target its effort to capacitating vaccination centres with the ability to vaccinate as many people as possible.
As of 7 August, 1 851 407 people have been injected with the first dose while 1 002 261 people have been fully vaccinated.
Statistics from the data presented by the Ministry of health on their daily updates suggests that there has been an upsurge in the number of people who are getting vaccinated per day since the introduction of the vaccination strategy last week.
The Zimbabwean vaccination campaign is not perfect but has been doing pretty well compared to other African countries as it ranked eight on the vaccination chart.
For the country to reach herd immunity, about 20 million doses are required to vaccinate 60% of the population. So far the country has acquired 5.5 million doses.
