[And yet thousands of Pakistanis,
from college students to retirees, have volunteered to be test subjects in
coronavirus vaccine trials at five urban hospitals. Since September, about
13,000 of 18,000 volunteers have participated in trials for a Chinese vaccine
made by CanSino Biologics. No serious side
effects have been reported, and health officials hope to finish the trials and
start distributing vaccines by March.]
By Pamela Constable and Shaiq
Hussain
Today, pockets of resistance to the
polio vaccine persist, and Pakistan remains one of only two countries,
alongside Afghanistan, where polio has not yet been eradicated.
And yet thousands of Pakistanis,
from college students to retirees, have volunteered to be test subjects in
coronavirus vaccine trials at five urban hospitals. Since September, about
13,000 of 18,000 volunteers have participated in trials for a Chinese vaccine
made by CanSino Biologics. No serious side
effects have been reported, and health officials hope to finish the trials and
start distributing vaccines by March.
Still, even these volunteers, eager
to help while Pakistan faces a resurgence of coronavirus cases and a race against time to begin
public inoculations, said they had to overcome personal doubts, frightening
social media rumors and opposition from their own families.
“I was aware of people talking
about conspiracies, about some chip being inserted into the body, about birth
control. Some in my family told me not to do it, but I didn’t care,” said one
government employee in his 30s who enrolled in September. “My heart told me to
do it. I just pray to God that we get rid of this fatal disease.”
The participant was among eight
volunteers recently interviewed by phone in Islamabad and Karachi. All said
they had heard the vaccines might be harmful but decided to sign up anyway. All
spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying hospital officials had instructed
that their identities be kept confidential. Each volunteer is paid $50.
Vaccines from China represent
Pakistan’s best hope for inoculating its 233 million citizens in the coming
year, officials say. A deeply impoverished country with a tiny
health budget, Pakistan has limited hospital space, and many areas have only
rudimentary health facilities.
[In
the world’s fifth most-populous country, distance learning is a single
television channel]
Since the virus first hit, Pakistan
has turned to China, its largest foreign economic partner and most important
political ally, for help. In the spring, Beijing provided medical equipment and
protective gear and sent doctors to help respond to the outbreak. Pakistani
officials said the Chinese manufacturer CanSino Biologics is now offering to
provide its vaccine at a favorable cost and distribute it on a “priority
basis.”
While Pakistan has seen a lower
number of coronavirus infections and fatalities than many countries — far fewer
than the United States and neighboring India, for example — a new wave of cases
has surged in the past several months. On Wednesday, Pakistan passed 10,000
deaths nationwide, and infections rose to 477,000, according to the national
health ministry.
Hundreds of thousands of jobs have
been lost since the virus arrived in March. The government, while reluctant to
order nationwide lockdowns, has enforced repeated temporary local lockdowns,
and business activity has plummeted.
Many Pakistanis have ignored
government advisories to wear masks and keep social distance, which are aired
constantly on radio, TV and mobile phones. This winter, thousands of people,
mostly unmasked, have crowded into holiday shopping bazaars and political
rallies by opposition parties.
Pakistan is also testing two other
Chinese-made vaccines, produced by Sinovac and Sinopharm, but the trials are
only in initial stages and far fewer volunteers are registered. The government
is part of Covax, the World Health Organization’s system for global cooperation
on a vaccine. Pakistani health officials said this will provide free vaccines
for about 20 percent of
the country’s population but that they will not be available until the fall of
2021.
Officials said they are in ongoing
discussions with other foreign manufacturers and have not made any final
decisions, but that so far they prefer the CanSino vaccine, saying it causes
fewer side effects than Western-made vaccines, such as BioNTech-Pfizer’s, and
can be stored in less extreme cold conditions.
“We are satisfied with the results
of CanSino,” said Naseem Salahuddin, head of the infectious diseases department
at Indus Hospital in Karachi, which plans to vaccinate about 4,000 volunteers.
She said other vaccines being tested are more complicated to use and store.
“CanSino suits us,” she said. “This is a one-time injection and we can store it
in our refrigerators.”
Javed Akram, vice chancellor of
Pakistan’s University of Health Sciences and a member of the national science
task force on the coronavirus, said some volunteers who took the
BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine had been hospitalized with resulting ailments but that
“not a single incident has occurred” in Pakistan’s trials with CanSino. He said
vaccine distribution will begin as soon as the trials are successfully
completed.
“We will not waste a single minute,”
Akram said last week. “The country is losing almost 100 lives daily because of
the pandemic.”
But critics say the pace of
government testing has been far too slow, and that with
more than 2,000 new cases being reported daily, hospitals are starting to fill
at an alarming pace. On Dec. 24, Pakistan reported 111 fatalities related to
covid-19, the highest single-day death toll during the pandemic’s second wave,
further intensifying public pressure on the government.
“The collective response of both
federal and provincial authorities has been hugely disappointing in the second
wave,” Dawn newspaper said in its lead editorial Sunday. “Pakistan is hurtling
towards an abyss as it sleepwalks its way into a crisis that could see its
healthcare system collapse.”
Faisal Sultan, the senior Pakistani
government adviser on health, told attendees at a news conference that the
“burden on hospitals is rapidly increasing” and appealed to the public to take
precautions. The manufacturing of vaccines, he said, “is not an excuse for the
masses to stop following” health advisories. “We will get the vaccine, but we
need to follow safety measures.”
In contrast to those who have
failed to take the covid-19 threat seriously, the volunteers allowing
themselves to be jabbed with an alien virus are taking a remarkable leap of
faith.
In Karachi, a volunteer in his 60s
said he initially had “many questions” about the possible impact, and that a
friend had sent him a video showing that the vaccine would “turn humans into
animals.” But after being vaccinated in October, he experienced only mild side
effects, and his wife and two sons then also enrolled.
A housewife in her 20s who was
vaccinated at Shifa Hospital International in Islamabad said she had been
worried about side effects but that her husband urged her to register “for a
good cause.” After being inoculated, she said, “nothing happened, just a little
body pain and fever.”
“People are spreading lies on
social media that the vaccine is bad and can impact fertility,” the woman said
in a telephone interview. “But I believe that without it, the virus will
continue to kill people.”
Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar,
Pakistan, contributed to this report.
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