By Faith Nyasuguta
Tanzania’s Zanzibar area has started vaccinating all its health workers with the Sinovac vaccine from China.
This marks a huge step for the East African nation that downplayed Covid-19 during the late president John Magufuli’s tenure. So far, it is still unclear how many vaccine doses Zanzibar island received from China.
Omar Dadi Shajak, the health ministry’s Secretary-General noted that a fraction of the received doses will be stored for usage during round two of vaccination.
“We have already identified those who got the first vaccine and we are not going to let people wait for longer for their second dose,” the health official noted.
Data on how many people have received Covid-19 jabs is still not available but it is clear that the jabs are dedicated to health workers.
Despite most parts of Tanzania still downplaying the presence of Covid-19, Zanzibar- a semi-autonomous archipelago- has confirmed that the Covid-19 is spreading locally despite the lack of official data on numbers.
