Churches want to close the rural gap in Covid-19 vaccine roll-out

The South African Council of Churches has launched a countrywide drive to help the elderly in rural areas get registered for Covid-19 vaccinations.

It is assisting the government with assessing the logistical challenges of the vaccine roll-out. The body has already identified several challenges likely to be faced in getting vaccination coverage to the country’s most remote areas.

Hesitancy is apparently rife among the elderly mostly due to lack of information as are concerns about whether doses will reach as many people as possible in rural areas . The Pfizer/BioNtech two-dose Covid-19 vaccine regime compounds the problem as the government will have to ensure the same hard-to-reach people who got the first dose will get the second six weeks later.

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SACC secretary-general Bishop Malusi Mpumlwana says the body is taking on the triple challenges of converting those who are unwilling to take vaccine out of fear or  misinformation, helping the government register as many people as possible and keeping track of those registered.

“This drive is part of our pastoral plan as the SACC, which actually began in March 2020. We developed a communication system that ensures authentic information is distributed and we have a dedicated website called Church in Action,” he says.

“Our people are all over the country and in every municipal ward there are no less than 10 to 15 churches. What we have done is to ask all the churches to identify volunteers who will assist with the registration and vaccination drive.”

Launching at Boxer Store outlets around the country, where the elderly queue for various government grants, the SACC was joined by the South African Medical Research Council and the UN Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) in registering senior citizens for the Covid-19 vaccine.

Mpumlwana  joined a queue of pensioners at the Boxer outlet in Protea Glen, Soweto where volunteers were helping people get registered on the EVDS. He says vaccine hesitancy is a great concern among the elderly.

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“Part of it has to do with the fact that many elderly people don’t think they need to keep themselves alive and they are going to die any way. We are trying to deal with that. There is also this nonsensical story that if you vaccinate you will die,” he says.

Logistically, Mpumlwana foresees a challenge in getting the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. “We worry about the return rate for the second jab. This is part of the reason why we keep tabs on people in our congregations who have vaccinated. That is why the infrastructure is important and being in every local municipality so that we keep tabs on the people that we know.”

The church council has also seen the difficulty with which government systems are able to reach remote and rural areas. The SACC has offered the government at least one church in every local municipality to act as a vaccination site complete with fridges if need be.

The most rural place they have reached so far, he says, is Mangosi in Mhlabuyalingana in northern KwaZulu-Natal, situated 20km south of the Mozambican border. “We know that the rural areas will be vaccinated later when the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is available which is a single-dose vaccine. But we are going ahead with the drive so when that time comes, everybody will get their jab.”

Simnikiweh@citizen.co.za