Undertakers in South Africa are joining the effort to get members of their communities vaccinated against COVID-19.
In early December, hearses began driving around the Soweto township of Johannesburg with sirens going. Inside were undertakers with pamphlets. Undertakers are defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as "a person whose job is to prepare dead bodies that are going to be buried or cremated and to organize funerals," a job quite similar to funeral directors.
One undertaker participating in the campaign was Vuyo Mabindisi, who owns and operates Vuyo's Funeral Services in Soweto. As he handed out pamphlets on the dangers of COVID-19 and the importance of vaccination, he told passerby, "We don't want to see you coming to our offices."
Only around 40 percent of South Africa's adults are fully vaccinated among a population of 60 million. More than 3 million cases have been reported in the country since the beginning of the pandemic, with over 90,000 deaths being attributed to the coronavirus.
Thankfully, the efforts of Mabindisi and other undertakers could be paying off. Many people stopped to ask questions about the COVID-19 vaccine, including where they could receive it. A Soweto church is among the places residents could get a vaccine, which is where bank employee Thabo Teffo received his first shot. Although initially skeptical of the vaccine, he recently changed his mind after a health scare.
"That encouraged me to go ahead and get vaccinated for my peace of mind and to protect my family," said Teffo.
A year after the COVID-19 vaccine became available, traditional public health campaigns promoting vaccination are often going unheeded. So an unconventional cadre of people has joined the effort.
They are opening sanctuaries and going door to door and village to village, touting the benefits of the vaccines and sometimes offering shots on the spot.
As the outbreak drags on into a third year, with the global death toll at 5.4 million, vaccine promoters are up against fear, mistrust, complacency, inconvenience and people who simply have bigger worries than COVID-19.
Rupali Limaye, a behavioral scientist who studies global vaccine hesitancy at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said community-level efforts may resonate more than impersonal mass media campaigns.
The Western-made vaccines have proved extraordinarily safe and remarkably effective overall at preventing COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations, and experts say that seems to be holding true even amid the spread of the highly contagious omicron variant. Health authorities warn that low vaccination rates are giving the virus more opportunities to mutate into new variants.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Post a Comment