KATHMANDU, JUNE 19
Director General of World Health Organisation Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has admired the efforts of Nepali health workers after a video on social media showing them transporting COVID-19 vaccines in a flooded river in the mountainous district of Mustang went viral.
Retweeting a video posted by a user @srp_dr31, Director General Tedros said, "This is how far health workers go to save lives." Further raising questions about many health workers still deprived of vaccination, he wrote, "Is it fair that in many places these heroes have still not been vaccinated ?" Tedros further raised the issue of equitable distribution of the vaccine. "It is our duty to do everything we can to ensure equitable delivery of vaccines, and the power lies within us," he said.
A short video shared on twitter had shown a vaccine carrier being passed to a health worker in PPE through a wooden stick by two other men across the overflowing river. The man in PPE was seen leaning close to the river to hold the wooden stick risking his life as he tried to get hold of a few boxes of vaccine.
The video had soon drawn the attention of thousands of people as it was circulated in popular social media sites such as Facebook and Tiktok.
The video also garnered popularity abroad.
Floods and landslides have already become a common sight in less than a week since the onset of monsoon in Nepal.
Manang district, which lies very close to the Himalayan range, also witnessed heavy flooding this time around. This has hindered the vaccination drive in remote places. Currently, the government has been administering COVID-19 vaccines to senior citizens between 60 to 64 years of age.
So far, Nepal has inoculated frontline workers, including health workers, journalists and some police personnel in the first phase. Earlier, it had launched the vaccination drive on January 27 of this year. According to the Ministry of Health and Population, as many as 731,653 people have received both doses of the vaccines so far, while the first dose has been administered to 2.5 million, meaning less than 2.5 per cent of Nepal's population have been fully vaccinated so far.
As many as 1.4 million people, including senior citizens who received the first dose of the vaccine before March, are still waiting for the second dose of Covishield vaccine.
In the last week of May, President Bidhya Devi Bhandari had sent written requests to the leaders of countries such as the US, UK and Russia that produce COVID vaccines. The government termed it 'vaccine diplomacy' in a bid to secure more doses for the country. The president's request to her Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping a few days ago saw Beijing send one million doses of the vaccines as grant. However, the president's request to western countries has not yielded the expected outcome till date.
A version of this article appears in the print on June 20, 2021, of The Himalayan Times.
