EDITORIAL: LET’S EMBRACE SCIENCE TO DEFEAT COVID-19 SCOURGE
Reports from the field on responses to Covid-19 vaccines in Tanzania are very much encouraging.
Tanzania rolled out mass vaccinations against the killer coronavirus pandemic last Wednesday, after receiving a consignment of a million doses of Janssen jabs under the Covax facility.
Early this week, inoculations had started at specified centres.
According to the Health ministry’s guidelines, the first to be inoculated were frontline healthcare workers and people over 50 years old, or have some underlying conditions.
Dar es Salaam’s chief medical officer, Dr Rashid Mfaume, expressed concerns that booking for vaccination via the national system showed an overwhelming number of people seeking the jabs and he was worried that the vaccination doses could be finished before all the applicants were inoculated.
Socioeconomic life worldwide was brought to its knees by the deadly new coronavirus malady that has already infected 200 million people, killing over 4.24 million of them since it erupted at the end of 2019.
Millions others are still at risk. This is to say that the world is at war with the pandemic, with leading scientists using available resources to find a lasting solution to the problem.
One ‘solution’ has come in the form of vaccines, whereby scientists built on the developments gained when the world faced the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2002 and 2003.
It took the scientists a relatively short time to come up with vaccines that were put to rigorous tests under the watch of the World Health Organisation (WHO) – and which, finally, were ready for rolling out in late 2020.
President Samia Suluhu Hassan has taken deliberate measures based on science to protect Tanzanians from the malady – leading to the successful roll-out of the vaccines which saw to her at the forefront in taking the jab.
Let’s embrace science to defeat the enemy in the form of Covid-19.
ADDRESS WEATHER ADVERSITIES
Climate change impacts are worrying, and need effective action to save the livelihood of millions of Tanzanians.
Vagaries of the weather leave thousands of livestock dead and crops destroyed, causing colossal losses to farmers. This does not augur well for any endeavours made to alleviate poverty in Tanzania and elsewhere across Africa.
Last week, Dr Nigel Crawhall exhorted the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) to help support indigenous communities. Indeed, he was spot-on – if only because such communities contribute little to climate change, but bear the brunt of its impact.
Certainly, the communities – mainly pastoralists and hunter-gatherers such as the Maasai and Hadzabe respectively – need scientific solutions to emerge from their traditional ways.
Currently, they largely depend on Mother Nature to survive; but they are increasingly falling victim to climate change by human activities and other causes thousands of miles away.
Land conflicts have also increased in recent years because of severe climate change-related impacts. These have to be addressed, and Unesco has a role to play.
The weather has become unpredictable lately, thus affecting agricultural production which, in turn, threatens food security.
Women in rural areas suffer the most because they have to walk long distances in search of water, which was previously available in the immediate vicinity of their villages.
