First, Ukraine got caught up in the geopolitics of vaccine distribution between Russia and the West, and struggled to get hold of any doses. Now that they have it, Ukraine faces a new challenge: finding enough people willing to be vaccinated.
The country is so plagued by misinformation about Covid-19 that the hesitation of vaccines in Ukraine is among the worst in Europe, even among doctors and nurses.
This is evident from the slow start of the vaccination program in Ukraine: so far, just over 23,000 people have received a dose from a population of 42 million.
Ukrainian news media spread reports of open vials of vaccine going to hospitals because not enough willing doctors and nurses could be found to receive the doses.
The United Nations Development Program and UNICEF have released a study stating that Ukraine is suffering from an ‘infodemia’, with social media ‘flooded with false reports’ about the disease and vaccination.
Ukraine’s tense internal policies are partly to blame.
Opponents of President Volodymyr Zelensky have extended their criticism of him to the two vaccines used by his administration – one from Oxford-AstraZeneca and the other from Sinovac – both of which are safe and effective in clinical trials.
A former prime minister, Yulia V. Tymoshenko, who now heads an opposition party, has tabled a bill in parliament that implicitly criticized Zelensky’s government choices by allowing the government to Compensate Ukrainians for any side effects and protect every Ukrainian from the negative consequences. Of the two vaccines.
A former president, Petro O. Poroshenko, said that Ukrainian health workers refuse vaccination in the belief that the two vaccines are of poor quality. He used scathological language to describe the vaccines in a speech in parliament.
Ukrainian Health Minister Maksym Stepanov said in an interview that the political struggle was weakening confidence in vaccination. “Politicians contribute to people’s distrust of vaccines,” he said.
Health officials said about one-third of doctors and nurses in the country are already infected with the coronavirus, and the rest are evenly distributed between those who want to be vaccinated and those who say they do not intend to be vaccinated. vaccines.
Mr. Stepanov said the negative attitude was widely regarded as “very false news spread by members of the anti-vaccination movement”.