Need of the hour, prioritise COVID-19 vaccinations under Public Health
COVID is here to stay with us, not for months but years. We cannot control this with curfews or quarantines alone. Those measures are temporary ‘patch-ups’ executed by sensible nations to prevent their health services from being overwhelmed. This lack of understanding or purposeful denial has resulted in some countries facing desperate situations. Some ran out of oxygen in hospitals and poor healthcare staff trying to help with whatever the facilities, have got infected and died or been abused by the public.
Health is the wealth of the nation. This is why most developed countries fought tooth and nail to control the pandemic in their own nations before thinking about others. This was because the ‘vaccination of the nation’ to enhance herd immunity was the only solution to return to ‘normality’ controlling the pandemic. Politicians who prioritised political interests before the health of the nation eventually failed with a huge national cost of lost lives (Trump in the USA, Bolsanaro in Brazil, Modi in India etc).
Our GDP is now considered to be approximately USD 4000/ person per annum and this comes in to the Government as foreign and local currency. The primary duty of the Government is to utilise this national income for public gain with minimal wastage. A single vaccination dose costs USD 3 and this amounts to 0.1% of our GDP. Without engaging in useless criticisms of the need to share the ‘patents’ etc, I am surprised why our Government cannot use 0.1% of the GDP to vaccinate our whole population. After all, on average, each one of us earns USD 4000 per year for the Government.
Sensible politicians in the world engaged in aggressive vaccination campaigns in their nations to control this pandemic. President Biden of the USA managed to vaccinate 200 million people within the first 100 days of his term of office and that was more than 50% of the population. We in Sri Lanka have only 21 million people. If we are to vaccinate 10 million people over 100 days we need only to vaccinate 100,000 people a day.
The successful vaccination programmes in the world (USA, UK, Israel) were achieved not by politicians but by health service staff who were given full responsibility and support to execute the programme. Unfortunately, in Sri Lanka, we do not know who is at the steering wheel. It could be a local politician overriding the government, a government minister who does not care or understand the urgency or a ‘retired military official’ prioritising lockdowns and punishment of the public.
A successful vaccination programme can result only by handing it over to the Public Health Department. The government should extend full support without interference as done by other countries. They will do the job in 100 days by establishing vaccination centres led by health officials and volunteers. Establishing gyms and exercise centres at the expense of our foreign reserves is not the priority.
Remember dengue time – we brought in laws and imprisoned people if they had ‘dengue friendly’ flower pots in their homes. This affected even old people who could not even attend to themselves. Did we control Dengue? No. We punished innocent people by a non-evidenced based criminalisation of an infection. What we need instead is more local research to identify the causes and resolutions.
COVID is no different. Now we have criminalised not wearing masks outdoors. Pathetic. Crowds and gatherings are known to be super-spreaders of COVID-19, but political rallies, meetings, political funerals and even weddings seem to be excluded. This reflects our weird political fairness and equality. Sad.