The Covid-19 lockdown can be blamed for a lot of things, including lapses in adherence to vaccination schedules for babies and young children, but mounting wariness towards inoculation seems to pre-date the pandemic.
This is according to National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) specialist pathologist Kerrigan McCarthy.
“Measles is incredibly infectious . . . The World Health Organisation (WHO) advises countries to achieve a 95% measles vaccination coverage rate. Now, I don’t think there is any programme in sub-Saharan Africa that has achieved that. In South Africa, we did a household vaccination coverage survey just before Covid in 2019 and identified that, on average, between 75% to 70% of children were fully vaccinated.
