Churches’ new resistance to measles vaccine

Four days into a fierce ground battle, the foot soldiers came up against unexpected resistance. The foot soldiers were Anene and her team of vaccinators and tallymen armed with syringes and vials of measles vaccine housed in a box packed with ice. They had come to immunise children in Umuagu area of Asaba, and Sunday […]

Four days into a fierce ground battle, the foot soldiers came up against unexpected resistance. The foot soldiers were Anene and her team of vaccinators and tallymen armed with syringes and vials of measles vaccine housed in a box packed with ice.
They had come to immunise children in Umuagu area of Asaba, and Sunday meant taking the battle to churches. But the church official at a Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Kingdom Hall was vehement.
“You can’t do that here,” he said. “Even if service closes, you still can’t.”
An independent monitor attached to the team fired off an SMS to senior state officials, the backward operating bases of the campaign to immunise some 39 million children aged nine months to five years that’s been on since last November.
The official in charge of Oshimili South demanded the exact location, where vaccinators had the previous day delivered letters informing churches of their visit on Sunday, and promised to sort it out. It meant bringing down a tonne of reasons supporting immunisation on the congregation.
“It is strange. They have never been like this,” Anene said of the congregation as the team reluctantly departed.
The next church was no different. A senior pastor who met the team at the church door declared, “This is the wrong time to do this. You can’t disrupt my service with that, you can’t do that here. My service is more important than what you are doing.”
Resistance to vaccination campaigns aren’t new. But congregations reluctant to have vaccinators disrupt their worship are becoming the latest stronghold preventing vaccines from reaching every child.
The team marked out Sunday to visit churches, hoping to catch children who have slipped through the cracks in the previous days’ vaccination at schools and the local health centre.
In that area alone, three churches turned vaccinators back, and they weren’t even on the established itinerary the team had mapped using geographic information system.
“Churches are opening up every day. These spines are not even in our micro-plan,” said Anene. “They don’t show up on maps, you can’t know they are there until you walk into the area.”
The ground battles Anene and her team face is the last holdout against measles, and they alongside independent monitors working the field with them, will determine success or failure to maintain a reasonable coverage of children.
Each local government area was given target to cover at least 20 percent of their target population every day. By day three, 10 local government areas lagged behind the 40 percent coverage threshold; the others were well above it. Oshimili South posted 111 percent coverage.
“I don’t really care about coverage,” said Minnie Oseji, permanent secretary of Delta State primary health care development agency. “What matters is how many children we have missed.” And focus is on field teams and monitors to make it happen.
Across the local governments, Delta’s proportion that has missed vaccination is still single – and double-digit number, and the state is at liberty to extend its five-day measles vaccination campaign by one more day to catch children who’ve slipped through the cracks.
The state itself has been struggling to play its part pushing vaccinators out guaranteeing their pay.
Reporters at daily evening review meetings that assess the day’s work reported vaccinators reluctant to work on account of pay.
The state primary health care needs the services of health care workers to immunise children visiting health centres, but can’t force workers who haven’t been paid salaries to work in the campaign.
Both local governments and the state government failed to release counterpart funds to support finance from federal government. Little funds released covered only fractions or didn’t state exactly what part of the campaign was being paid for.
The result is some officials devoted some of the money allocated them to buy consumables as cotton wool, hand towels, soap, buckets for washing hands.
It is borrowed money, they have said, and getting it paid back runs the risk of raising suspicions and questions about measles campaign spending.
But a bigger risk will be not ensuring all miscellaneous requirements are put into budgeting the next possible campaign, coated and backed with hard cash before anything begins, even if it is buying a wash bucket or convincing a pastor to open his church doors to vaccinators.