Not many takers for tests, jabs in rural India

Kalwa, June 5: When health worker Neelam Kumari knocks on doors in villages the occupants sometimes run out the back, terrified that she wants to vaccinate them against Covid-19.

With India’s devastating recent virus surge easing in cities, the deadly pandemic is ravaging the vast poverty-stricken rural hinterland. But here, ignorance and fear rule.

“A lot of people in my village don’t want to take the vaccine. They fear that they will die if they take it,” Kumari told AFP in Dhatrath, a collection of two-storey buildings in Haryana with buffaloes wandering the streets.

“One of the villagers was so angry that he beat up a (health) worker who was trying to convince him to take the vaccine.”

Just 15 percent of people in rural areas, compared with 30 percent in towns and cities, have received at least one vaccine dose so far - even though twothirds of cases are being reported in the countryside, according to an analysis in a newspaper.

Rumours are shared online or spread through messaging apps like WhatsApp. Fears that 5G causes Covid-19 led to mobile towers being attacked in Haryana.

“People do not even step forward for testing as they think the government will declare them Covid-positive even if they are not,” Shoeb Ali, a doctor in Miyaganj village in Uttar Pradesh, told AFP.

This fear pervades despite the sight of bodies dumped in rivers and hundreds of shallow graves suggesting that Covid is raging in hinterland where 70 percent of the population lives.

In Nuran Khera village in Haryana, residents are reluctant to get inoculated even though they said many households reported having fever - and dozens of people dying.

“Even after opening up a vaccine centre here, nobody is ready to take it,” villager Rajesh Kumar, 45, told AFP.

“I won't take the vaccine because it has many side effects. People get sick after getting vaccines.”