• The government plans to reach at least 1.25 million Kenyans in the next 116 days.
• The ministry has said the existing cold chain capacity will be extended at health facility level to enable them to handle Covid-19 vaccines.
Image: ANDREW KASUKU
Covid-19 vaccines have been dispatched to the nine regional centres and inoculation is expected to start on Friday.
In Nairobi, the exercise will start at Kenyatta National Hospital.
The government plans to reach at least 1.25 million Kenyans in the next 116 days.
This means at least 10,775 people must be vaccinated in a day and at least 448 per hour.
The 1.02 million doses of vaccines, which arrived in the country on Tuesday night, were flagged off from the national store in Kitengela by President Uhuru Kenyatta.
“Because of the demand globally, we are rolling out the vaccine deployment in phases. The first phase is targeting frontline healthcare workers and others providing essential services,” Health CS Mutahi Kagwe said.
“By the end of the week, tomorrow, we shall have the vaccinees receiving their jabs at Kenyatta National Hospital. We expect other facilities to quickly follow suit across the country, starting with county referral hospitals,” he added.
The ministry has said the existing cold chain capacity will be extended to the health facility level to enable them to handle Covid-19 vaccines alongside existing childhood vaccines.
According to the Health ministry, the government has scaled up coverage of immunisation services from 50 per cent to more than 90 per cent of the health facilities in the country through procurement and installation of specialised vaccine storage equipment in at least 5,000 health facilities.
Similarly, 290 subcounty vaccine depots have been set up, as well as construction of a national and eight regional ultramodern vaccine depots.
The national vaccines store has the capacity to hold 130,000 litres of vaccines under temperatures of two to eight degrees Celsius. It has a storage capacity of 14,400 litres for vaccines that require -30 degrees Celsius.
From the ports of entry, the vaccines are distributed quarterly to more than 8,000 health facilities in the counties, through nine regional depots.
All vaccines at the central store in Kitengela are stored under the recommended temperatures.
Cold rooms and freezer rooms are equipped with external and digital temperature displays and remote temperature monitoring devices that are web-based and SMS-enabled. This helps the staff to monitor conditions in real-time from any location in the country.
The facility has a workshop where repair works for cold chain equipment are undertaken as well as capacity building for medical engineering technologists from the counties.
“The facility also boasts of a dry storage space of more than 1000m3. This infrastructure is going to be key in deployment of the Covid-19 vaccines,” the CS said.
The facility also has a standby generator that is able to run all the equipment in case of any power outage.
As the vaccination drive begins, doctors from the Catholic Church have come out to express their disapproval of the Covid-19 vaccine.
Doctors under the Kenya Doctors Association on Friday said there are partisan interests that seem bent on keeping some important truths from coming to the fore at the expense of human life.
“We know for a fact that there are drugs that have been re-purposed and used effectively to treat Covid-19. We also know that vaccination for this disease is totally unnecessary making the motivation suspect,” they said.