Bullying won’t boost Covid vaccine uptake

The other day the government announced that Kenyans who are noovid-19 will be denied in-person services, access to gatherings, public transport, parks, hotels, and restaurants.

The policy communication here was that government intends to pursue a vax-only position to attain the country’s target of vaccinating at least 10 million people by the end of the year.

The Ministry of Health was honest enough that they are taking this vaccination mandate from the rest of the world.

A number of countries are making the Covid-19 vaccination compulsory like Germany where vaccination is required for all but the most essential businesses such as grocery stores and pharmacies.

Italy requires vaccination for indoor seating at bars, restaurants, cinemas, clubs and all public transport. The Netherlands has mandatory health pass requirement for bars, restaurants, clubs; France has vaccination mandate for healthcare and care home workers, home aids and urgent care technicians, but the mandate was postponed in some places because of protest by some health workers.

In the US, vaccination mandate was demanded from federal workers, contractors, private sector workers in companies with 100 or more employees but has been temporarily blocked by a federal appeals court, public-sector workers also contested it in court.

African countries are now copying and pasting this vax-only policy when it is estimated that 78 percent of the African population are not yet vaccinated, according to a research from Partnership for Evidence-Based Response to Covid-19 (PERC).

Only seven percent of the African continent has been vaccinated and according to the report, vaccine hesitancy is not the top challenge.

Kenya is among those African countries which has misdiagnosed the problem about vaccine uptake as a hesitancy problem, the reason it is pushing for vaccination mandate with less than 10 percent of the population vaccinated.

Many of the developed countries that are implementing the vaccination mandate have more than 40 percent of the population vaccinated and are trying to push for the last-mile campaign.

So, when Kenya government announces that vaccination will be compulsory, does it mean that the public has lost faith in the administrative State in convincing the public about the need to protect public health?

Is it hard for government to assemble experts to make dispassionate and unbiased arguments on what government interventions are necessary and how they should be structured because vaccine hesitancy is really not the problem?

If government will choose the bullying pulpit to push for more vaccinated numbers, that might backfire; it will just need one well known personality to push back and lead an antivaxxers campaign.

In the US, the New York City introduced the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for sports players and Brooklyn Nets player Kyrie Irving was the first to resist, saying “in order to be in New York City, in order to be on a team, I have to be vaccinated. I chose to be unvaccinated and that is my choice, and I would ask you all to just respect that choice.”

Therefore, a government that is struggling to gain public support can easily find itself on the firing line with a vaccination mandate policy with conspiracy theorists riding on the hostility towards the government.

What the Kenyan government should do is to make the vaccines as available as possible. Kenya has a track record of leading a mass vaccination drive through the successful case of polio vaccination, so it just needs to deploy the same vaccination infrastructure network.

This should be in tandem with a public education programme by experts.

The biggest failure has been that the people leading the Covid-19 response are seen in political rallies where coronavirus protocols are not honoured, making it difficult to gain public support.