Thread by @amitsurg

I’m bringing some good news today on the rural vaccine hesitancy front. But first, a short summary of our visit to a cluster of tribal villages at the base of Bhimashankar on Friday for planning our next series of rural health projects. #Thread

These tribal villages are the last cluster in Raigad district, before Pune District. About 15km from Kashele. On virtual meeting with locals, we got an impression that health related requirements were not significant. But site visit showed a completely different picture.

Most deliveries even today at this cluster are done at home. Emergency care is non existent because:
No ambulance services
Poorly equipped and staffed “district hospital” at Kashele which is hardly better than a PHC
Most patients get referred to either Karjat or Mumbai.

Even a basic GP or chemist isn’t available for a distance of 15km. So we our work cut out for the next few years: create linkages for emergency access and services, train health workers locally to manage basic healthcare needs using telemedicine, conduct medical camps etc.

But we found an unexpected silver lining in this bleak scenario: most eligible villagers have received one shot of the COVID vaccine. There is no vaccine hesitancy here any more, compared to a month back. How did this happen? It’s a sad and happy short story.

Health workers have been visiting the villages, trying to convince villagers to protect themselves from the pandemic, since a few months. As in other places, rumours and fears that people die on taking the vaccine made their task extremely difficult. Then two villagers died.

Both weren’t tested, and didn’t count as COVID deaths. But villagers were smart enough to know the cause of fever followed by sudden breathlessness and collapse. One was 70, the other just 30. This unfortunate event led to some of the villagers taking their first shot.

Once the initial few shots were successfully given, almost everyone lined up and got their shots. Curiously, all kids in the village are fully vaccinated. People don’t hesitate to give the shots to their kids but are scared to take it themselves 🙂

The good news is that vaccine hesitancy in rural India will soon be a thing of the past. The bad news is that a lot of deaths that were preventable by vaccination would happen before the hesitancy disappears.