Of the 2,238 people with comorbidities who had been vaccinated by the end of January, 41 percent were people living with HIV; 18 percent had hypertension; 15 percent were TB patients and 10 percent had diabetes.
“Don’t tell me that people in South Africa don’t want the vaccine. We want it but in our communities getting it is an extra challenge when life is already hard. I agreed to take the vaccine at Site C [Nolungile Clinic] because it was made simple, I was at the clinic anyway,” said Ntombekhaya Tsholoba, a Khayelitsha resident.
Expanding vaccine access with mobile pop-up sites
In parallel, MSF has been taking vaccination into the Khayelitsha community since July 2021, including the development and running of pop-up vaccine sites in partnership with City of Cape Town Health Department.
“Facility-based vaccination started in May 2021 but we found that many people were not coming to these sites due to the cost of transport, restrictive clinic opening times, and a lack of mobile data to register online for vaccination,” said MSF health promotion manager Mpumi Zokufa.
“We started visiting specific areas and with the help of members of the community health forum, who are well-known and influential, we did health promotion and registered those who were willing to be vaccinated on the EVDS,” Zokufa said.
Community-based health promotion
When a large number of people has been registered in a specific location, MSF calls the City of Cape Town (CoCT) vaccination team to come and vaccinate, using mobile pop-up vaccine sites. As a result of this partnership the number of those registered and vaccinated in Khayelitsha increased by 18,600 people. When MSF found that vaccination uptake was low among youth and males, the health promotion team decided to use murals on community walls as a means of raising awareness about the COVID-19 vaccine.
“There has been investment in digital COVID-19 campaigns but community-based, street-level health promotion was largely missing, and we knew we needed to address this gap,” Zokufa said.