COVID in Kurdistan: from vaccine hesitancy to vaccine rush

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Vaccine hesitancy may have been the prevailing feeling among the Kurdistan Region’s citizens when the first batch of the COVID-19 vaccine arrived in early March, but soon it turned into a rush where those seeking the shots outweigh available doses.

The Kurdistan Region’s health ministry on Sunday announced that this week the number of people seeking the jab has increased six-fold, marking a sharp increase during this period of the region’s vaccination process. Previously, centers designated for the vaccine were witnessing only a handful of visitors every day.

While vaccine hesitancy – marked by uncertainties and even fears around inoculations – is a phenomenon witnessed elsewhere in the world, Iraq and its autonomous Kurdish region are not devoid of such doubters.

On top of common unfounded theories on vaccines in general, coronavirus-specific hesitancy was enforced by the concerns around the side effects of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine – specifically blood clots, which no one in the Region to this day has developed, according to the health ministry.

But something shifted after the original rollout, in part due to a campaign by officials to urge people to be vaccinated and possibly spurred by the arrival of Western vaccines.

VIDEO: Kurdistan Region rolls out COVID-19 vaccination program

In addition to China’s Sinopharm, the British-Swedish AstraZeneca and US-German Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are currently available throughout Kurdistan. Eighty-five percent of the 55,000 available doses have so far been administered, including all of the Pfizer supply, according to the health ministry.

In one incident last week a large Erbil hospital that had Pfizer stock was overrun with vaccine-seekers, forcing officials to shut its doors after just two hours. The ministry later said the vaccine would no longer be administered to anyone who did not first register online.

Earlier this month Kurdish health authorities launched an online registration platform for citizens to make an appointment for their jabs, and officials publicly urged people to sign up. 

Fresh deliveries of both Sinopharm and Pfizer are expected this week.

The Region is also in talks with vaccine-makers directly in order to independently secure additional supplies, according to health minister Saman Barzinji. The ministry said on Sunday that a “vaccine visa has been prepared” for people who are fully vaccinated.

The Kurdistan Region has so far recorded over 139,000 COVID-19 infections and 3,800 deaths since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.

Editing by Joanne Stocker-Kelly