Rush for vaccine rises in MP after awareness drives

Barely a month ago, incidents of vaccine awareness teams being chased away by locals at several places in Madhya Pradesh used to make headlines in the media.

Currently, the state government is battling hard to tackle the ‘craze for a shot of vaccine’ being witnessed among the people across the state.

The turnaround in the situation, an outcome of a strategy designed by the state government to shed vaccine hesitancy among the people, has however, posed a new challenge for it as the vaccine centres are currently witnessing a mad rush of people for jab.

“The vaccine acceptance among the tribals in remote pockets of Jhabua was so poor a month ago that not a single dose of vaccine could be shot in around 25 out of 130 vaccine centres opened in the district in the initial period of vaccination.

We had hardly received order of 2,000 doses of vaccine a month ago which has grown to 20,000 now”, state vaccination coordination officer and director (immunization), National Health Mission (NHM), Dr Santosh Shukla told this newspaper on Monday.

Incidents like medical teams visiting the villages particularly in tribal areas to raise awareness being chased away and even beaten in May and June this year.

Such incidents were reported in the tribal-dominated districts of Jhabua, Dhar and Dindori.

“Tribals have a belief that only children are vaccinated and the adult get pricks (injection) only when they fall sick. The tribals feared that they may die if vaccinated. We convinced them it may prove fatal for them if they are not vaccinated”, Dr Shukla said.