Vaccination Campaign in Kazakhstan Is About to Fail, Says Deputy
Deputies of the Kazakhstani parliament wonder if there is a detailed plan on mass vaccination. They want to see a schedule of vaccinations and a list of all sites where people can get their shots.
According to the Mazhilis (lower chamber of the parliament) Deputy Irina Unzhakova, who is representing the Nur Otan party, the health system officials talk about the vaccination campaign all the time but no real results are available.
«Unfortunately, we haven’t seen any results yet. Probably they are so small that they just wouldn’t be able to improve the epidemiological situation in the country. It’s obvious that the number of reported cases doesn’t change. I mean many of our regions are already in the red zone in terms of COVID-19,» the deputy said.
The current situation, when people do not know where they can get a vaccine shot, is very similar to last year’s situation when Kazakhstanis couldn’t make PCR testing or find any information about that.
According to Unzhakova in such countries as Israel, the U.K., Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Singapore and others, about 90% of the population has already gotten their vaccine shots.
«As health system official says, about 100,000 people were vaccinated in Kazakhstan so far. This is less than 1% of our population while the vaccination campaign started two months ago. No mathematical science degree is needed to count that this rate of the vaccination campaign speed would require 15 years to cover 70% out of 19 million people in our country,» she underlined.
Moreover, Unzhakova has raised a question about the Kazakhstani-made vaccine because there is no information about the production cycle except the fact that the vaccine was registered.
«Kazakhstan has allocated about 18 billion tenge ($42.4 million) to buy and produce Russian vaccine Sputnik V. The lion’s share of it, $35.8 million, has been given to Karaganda Pharmaceutical Complex. However, the plant produced just 243,000 doses with 150,000 doses still unused,» the deputy stated.
Another huge concern is the Zhambyl manufacturing site. This new plant was built recently but there is no proper equipment because of poor preliminary planning.
«It’s absolutely clear that the Ministry of Health has to take urgent steps in this direction or we can find ourselves in the situation similar to last summer when we were severely hit by the pandemic,» Irina Unzhakova said.
Earlier, the health system reported 1,600 new COVID-19 cases. At the same time Alexey Tsoy, the health minister said that the new British and South African COVID-19 strain variants were diagnosed in Kazakhstan recently.
