Prime
How private sector can help vaccine rollout
Kaboggoza Kibudde
What you need to know:
- A blanket rejection of the private sale of vaccines to the public is not the most suitable remedy.
When you give someone a fish, you feed them for a day, but if you teach them how to fish, you feed them for a lifetime. The point being - it is better to teach someone to do something for themselves than to keep doing it for them.
It is, therefore, worrying when a government places itself at the centre of individuals’ lives. A policy has led to an outbreak of the ‘government etuyambe’ mentality in Uganda, where people place primary responsibility for their lives (and progress) on the government instead of themselves. This impotence of the mind is very dangerous for our society and needs urgent attention.
But besides nurturing that malady, one gets the sense that government is stifling the more upright citizens who adopted a superior mentality of taking primary responsibility for their lives. Such citizens do not wait for free government services, which, for understandable reasons, are usually of more inferior quality.
They prefer exerting themselves to earn money so they can afford better. When Covid-19 struck, these Ugandans didn’t sit around waiting for free government masks; they bought their own and secured their lives. And if it were up to them, they would pay to be vaccinated rather than wait defencelessly for free government vaccines.
Unfortunately, government has robbed them of that right by stopping the purely private-sector sale of vaccines to the general public. Government’s reason? “The risks associated with fake vaccines and exploitation of the population are high”.
While government has an important regulatory role, that role does not end at stopping ‘fake’ drugs from coming into our country. It also entails ensuring that the ‘good’ ones get in!
So, a blanket rejection of the private sale of vaccines to the general public is not the most suitable remedy for potential misbehaviour by some private actors. A compromise can be reached where government selects a handful of reputable and compliant private hospitals/pharmacies in Kampala Metropolitan area.
National Drug Authority (NDA) already knows which pharmacies consistently comply with regulatory requirements. NDA can conduct re-evaluations and more frequent monitoring during vaccine roll-out to ensure that these facilities meet any new requirements. This wouldn’t significantly stretch NDA because only a handful of private companies will be selected.
As for monitoring side-effects, government should not hold the private sector to a higher standard than it holds itself. The private sector should be able to adopt the same approach government has used to monitor side effects in its vaccination programme. This involves asking people to stay at the vaccination centre for 30 minutes after being vaccinated so they can be monitored for extremely rare but potentially life-threatening side effects. In addition, it involves health workers or patients themselves reporting side-effects directly to NDA.
Regarding in-country vaccine quality, automated temperature monitoring systems capable of sending SMS or email alerts can be installed in the selected private facilities, with NDA set as one of the alert recipients.
The alerts should be set at values that allow for timely intervention before the danger zone is reached. Some clinical research facilities in Uganda are already using such automated temperature monitoring systems to monitor the temperature of investigational medicines.
Lastly, centralised record-keeping can be achieved by requiring private facilities to enter patient and vaccine data into a government-controlled web-based system that is linked to the national database. If a company fails to comply with these requirements, government can publicly revoke its vaccination licence.
Hopefully, this addresses some of the concerns about vaccine quality. Next, we turn to the exploitation of the population.
Mr Kibudde is a socio-political thinker
[email protected] Twitter: @kkaboggoza
