the launch of the vaccination campaign postponed

2 mins

The Congolese will still have to wait. While the DRC is the country most affected in the world by the Mpox epidemicwith more than 30,000 cases already reported including 988 deaths, the vaccination campaign which was to begin this Wednesday is finally postponed by three days. The cause is the delay in training the technical teams who will be responsible for vaccination in the field. Each team is made up of vaccinators, pointers, sensitizers or even those responsible for the safety of the group. “ We have to train everyone, it’s complex work », Explains a doctor from South Kivu.

The deployment of vaccines across the vast DRC also fell behind schedule. It was first necessary to ensure a functional cold chain and it was only last weekend that Unicef ​​was able to send nearly 40,000 vaccines to Equateur, North Kivu and the Tshopo.

Despite all these problems and many others, the Congolese Minister of Health, Roger Kamba, assures that they will be ready on Saturday to launch vaccination against Mpox. Except for South Kivu, in particular, where the provincial Minister of Health announced that this campaign will only begin on Monday October 7, time to transport the vaccines received at the beginning of the week to the health zones most affected by monkeypox.

“ This is very few vaccines if we compare to the real needs », was alarmed by a doctor from the South Kivu response team. The DRC, a country of 99 million inhabitants, currently only has 265,000 doses of vaccine, approved only for adults, while children are today the most affected in the east of the country. But Minister Roger Kamba indicates that an agreement has been reached with Japan for the delivery of 3 million doses of a vaccine approved for children.