Ukraine must carefully prepare a vaccination campaign against COVID-19, otherwise the vaccination mechanism will not stop the epidemic, said head of the KSE Center for Health Economics, ex-Deputy Minister of Health Pavlo Kovtoniuk.
“We believe that without an emergency and massive vaccination campaign, Ukraine will not be able to use the tool [vaccination] in such a way that it somehow has at least a little impact on the distribution pattern,” he said during the weekly online presentation of KSE on Thursday.
Kovtoniuk noted that according to the calculations of the KSE, even in the “ideal world” Ukraine will not be able to vaccinate risk groups. In particular, if you vaccinate the greatest risk group – people over 55 years old, who, according to statistics, most often get sick with COVID-19, it will be necessary to vaccinate 13.5 million people in Ukraine.
According to KSE calculations, for such a vaccination “in an ideal world, when everyone has the vaccine and everyone came to the vaccination rooms at the same time, and all 6,580 vaccination rooms will work eight hours without breaks and weekends, and all these people will receive two doses of the vaccine,” six months will be needed.
“Even in ideal conditions, when everything comes along, we will be able to vaccinate the category of older people in only six months. But we understand that people do not come to vaccination rooms in an organized manner, that vaccines will not be delivered in proportional way, that some of the vaccines will come on the initiative of COVAX, and some will have to be bought, and they will be delivered at different times. There will be many more factors that will slow down this process. And only 36% of the population will be able to get vaccinated. We are not talking about herd immunity,” said Kovtoniuk.
“If we simply give people the opportunity to vaccinate at will, the process will drag on for years and even then the main risk groups will not be vaccinated. And in fact we do not use this tool,” he stressed.
Kovtoniuk believes it is most likely that “we will live in one mode or another with COVID-19 throughout 2021.”
“Vaccination will be one of the ways to combat COVID-19, but it will not be a miracle weapon that will destroy COVID-19. Other methods of struggle will continue to work: this is a powerful testing system that needs to be built, it is also powerful, I would say the aggressive contact tracing system that needs to be built is quarantine restrictions, which will still be present,” he said.
