DODOMA, Tanzania (AP) – Tanzania’s health ministry says there are no plans to accept COVID-19 vaccines, days after the country’s president of 60 million people expressed doubts about the vaccines without providing evidence. liver.
Health Minister Dorothy Gwajima told a news conference in the capital Dodoma on Monday that “the ministry does not plan to receive vaccines for COVID-19.” Any vaccines must be approved by the ministry. It is not clear when any vaccines could come, although Tanzania is eligible for the COVAX global effort to deliver doses to low- and middle-income countries.
The health minister has insisted that Tanzania be safe. During a presentation in which she and others did not wear face masks, she urged the public to improve hygiene practices, including the use of disinfectants, but also steam inhalation – which has been rejected by health experts elsewhere as a way to kill the coronavirus .
Fidelice Mafumiko, chief chemist for the government, also suggested using herbal medicine to cure COVID-19 without providing evidence.
The Tanzanian government has been widely criticized for its approach to the pandemic. It has not updated its number of coronavirus infections (509) since April.
The world head of the World Health Organization in Africa last week called on Tanzania to share its data on infections, while the director of Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said: “if we do not fight it as a collective on the continent, we are doomed. “
President John Magufuli, who has long claimed that God eliminated COVID-19 in Tanzania, claimed last week that vaccines were “inappropriate” for it, even as the first major deliveries of vaccines began on the African continent.
But authorities in Tanzania, from the Catholic Church to government institutions, are pushing back and telling the public and employees that COVID-19 exists in the country precaution must be taken.
Although it is difficult to determine the level of viral infections in Tanzania, the leading opposition party ACT Wazalendo announced this week that party leader Seif Sharif Hamad, vice president of the semi-autonomous island region of Zanzibar, is being treated for COVID-19.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its latest travel warning about Tanzania says the country’s level of COVID-19 is ‘very high’. It gives no details, but insists on all travel to the East African nation.
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