According to Margaret Muhanga Mugisa, the State Minister of Health in charge of Primary Health Care, they resolved to involve religious leaders in this campaign to help them amplify the vaccination message in the wake of high rates of misinformation being spread by anti-vaxxers especially on social media platforms.
The Ministry of Health has held an orientation meeting with religious leaders ahead of the official launch of a new immunisation exercise against malaria, scheduled to start next Wednesday.
Speaking at the meeting attended by muslim leaders, catholic, anglican, orthodox and Pastor Joseph Serwadda, the presiding Apostle of the Born Again Faith in Uganda, Dr Richard Kabanda who heads the Health Promotion Department at the Ministry of Health said that they had signed MOUs with religious leaders revealing that they now need to mobilise money for them to be able to do the work.
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Jackie Katana, the Executive Director of Faith for Family Health, an NGO that mobilised the religious leaders to attend this meeting, said delegates came from fourteen regions and have been urged to incorporate vaccine messages while preaching to create demand for the drug.
According to Margaret Muhanga Mugisa, the State Minister of Health in charge of Primary Health Care, they resolved to involve religious leaders in this campaign to help them amplify the vaccination message in the wake of high rates of misinformation being spread by anti-vaxxers, especially on social media platforms.
Muhanga stressed that misinformation and vaccine hesitancy remain a huge challenge that the government recently lost up to 80 million dollars when Ugandans refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19 due to lies spread by anti-vaxxers.
Her point was re-echoed by Permanent Secretary Dr Diana Atwine, who expressed fears that the more they add new vaccines to the schedule, the more individuals are coming up with unsubstantiated claims, which risks undoing disease prevention efforts.
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Sheikh Ali Muhammad Waiswa, the Deputy Mufti at the Uganda Muslim Supreme Council, encouraged fellow religious leaders to actively get involved, noting that the country needs to be armed with several prevention tools to be able to avert unnecessary deaths caused by such diseases as malaria.
Meanwhile, unlike previous campaigns where the Ministry goes to schools or door-to-door immunising children, the malaria vaccines will be placed at health facilities with a plan to, in future, add them to the routine immunisation schedule across the country.
However, Kabanda clarifies that the coming malaria vaccine does not replace other prevention options such as sleeping under mosquito nets, as the vaccine does not completely protect against infection,n but helps reduce the chances of one developing severe forms of the disea,se which have been claiming sixteen lives every day in the country.
About 2.2 million doses of the vaccine have been provided by GAVI, the Vaccines Alliance, to kickstart the vaccination programme that starts in high and moderate-transmission districts, before rolling out countrywide.
The four-dose vaccine targeting children aged below two years will be administered at 6, 7, 8 and 18 months, ensuring optimal protection from malaria during the most vulnerable stages of early childhood.
Currently in Uganda, children account for not just the majority of deaths but also hospital admissions.
