“You are our family. You are our friends. You are our neighbors. They are our partners, ”said Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison last week. “This is in the interests of Australia and in the interests of our region.”
Covax, a global health initiative aimed at making vaccination access more equitable, began rolling out vaccine doses for developing countries last month and is expected to deliver 588,000 to Papua New Guinea by June.
However, in some cases, wealthier nations have failed to honor contracts and have reduced the number of cans the initiative can buy, said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director of the World Health Organization, in a statement last month. He warned the pandemic would not end until everyone was vaccinated.
“This is not a question of charity,” he said. “It’s a question of epidemiology.”
Until then, officials in Papua New Guinea will not only have to fight the virus itself, but also a deluge of misinformation about the pathogen and vaccines, most of which is broadcast via social media channels.
“Even for trained health workers, there are many doubts,” said Dr. Nou, the Port Moresby-based doctor who conducted a survey of health workers’ views on the pandemic. He said that some in the country believed the virus was a joke, or that people on the island were immune, or that it was safer to contract the virus than to be vaccinated.
With the country now waging a full battle against the coronavirus, some public health experts fear that the diversion of resources could cause deadly costs for people with other serious health problems such as malaria or tuberculosis. Papua New Guinea has some of the highest rates of tuberculosis in the world.
