Vaccine roll-out slow in ENB

By MICHAEL PHILIP
THE roll-out of Coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccination in East New Britain is a challenge as people are reluctant to get vaccinated, an official says.
Officer-in-charge of Covid-19 vaccinations at Butuwin Health Centre, Arandy Sirifave, told The National that misleading information on social media had caused people not to get vaccinated.
“So far we’ve attended mostly to working class people,” she said.
“And that’s because it’s part of their work requirements as most companies and shops require their employees to be vaccinated.
“From our observation, we have a high number of working class people, people applying for jobs overseas and within the country coming in get vaccinated.”
She said initially only a small number of people from the villages and wards had been coming in to be vaccinated but after an awareness more had started turning up.
Sirifave said the highest population getting vaccinated in the province were foreigners.
She said for rural vaccination, they planned to carry out a survey in the coming weeks to see the number of interested people willing to get the vaccine.
“For rural vaccination, we can’t just go in there and force people to get vaccinated.
“The real challenge is in there. They have different thoughts due to false information on social media,” she said.
“So we plan to carry out a survey and from the survey, then we see whoever wants to get the vaccine then we go and give.
Sirifave added that the vaccine orders to Port Moresby depended entirely on the turnout of people.
“Our responsibility now is to do awareness and convince people to get vaccinated. It’s a big challenge for us.
“If you already vaccinated, that doesn’t mean you stop following the protocols. My advice is we all should be vaccinated to reduce the number of Covid-19 cases.”