Seven babies stillborn in one night as nurses strike over salaries
hoard vaccines by rich countries” and feed “a dangerous trend of vaccine nationalism”.
The concern is that vaccine supply and allocation in this pandemic will echo the last – caused by the H1N1 flu virus in 2009/2010 – when rich nations bought up the available supply of vaccines, initially leaving poor countries with none.
In that instance, since H1N1 turned out to be a milder disease and the pandemic ultimately petered out, the impact on infections and deaths from vaccine imbalances was limited.
However Covid-19 is a far greater threat, and leaving swathes of the world’s people vulnerable will not only harm them, but also extend the pandemic and the damage it can cause, health experts say.
“There’s a risk that some countries are doing exactly what we feared – which is every man for himself,” said Gayle Smith, former head of the US Agency for International Development and chief executive of the One Campaign, a non-profit aimed at ending poverty and preventable disease.
More than 75 wealthier countries, including Britain, have expressed interest in the Covax financing scheme, which is also co-led by the World Health Organization and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, joining 90 poorer ones who would be supported through donations.
But the US, China and Russia are not among countries expressing interest in Covax, according to Gavi.
SEVEN babies were stillborn in one night at a major Zimbabwe hospital this week because their mothers did not get adequate medical care due to a nurses’ strike, doctors said yesterday, as a dispute over working conditions cripples hospitals.
Nurses went on strike countrywide last month demanding US dollar salaries, which the government says it cannot afford.
That has left government hospitals with skeleton staff and doctors and senior nurses stretched at a time when the country is grappling with rising Covid-19 cases.
Out of eight pregnant women who underwent Caesarean sections on Monday night at Sally Mugabe Hospital, the biggest in the country, only one successfully delivered a baby, three doctors who work in the maternity and paediatric units told Reuters.
“This was preventable. Some ruptured their uterus because nobody was there to monitor them, so when interventions were made it was to save the mother,” one of the doctors said, declining to be identified because they are not allowed to speak to the press.
Another doctor said fresh stillbirths – meaning a baby that dies during labour or delivery – were just a window into the state of Zimbabwe’s public hospitals, which had become “dysfunctional and a death trap to citizens”.
Expecting mothers are spending hours sleeping on benches or the floor in the cold before they are attended to, as smaller clinics which usually absorb some patients are closed due to the strike, piling pressure on major hospitals, doctors said.
Zimbabwe’s Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said the situation in hospitals was “beyond dire”.
“Simply put, unborn children and mothers are dying daily, or suffering from the repercussions of inadequate care,” the organisation said in a statement.
The situation could worsen as an ultimatum for higher pay issued by senior doctors expired yesterday without a resolution. The doctors have said they will go on strike.
Commenting on the stillbirths, President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s spokesperson George Charamba, wrote on Twitter: “When the true story gets known, many shall be shocked. There is a limit to what can be done with human lives, tender ones at that, all to mobilise for dead political ends.”