Kenya's robust plan to secure Covid-19 vaccines

It has earned the name ‘Mafya House’ based on the numerous scandals that have rocked the Health Ministry in the recent past; the blood selling cartels and the recent KEMSA scandal.

But in an effort to avert another scandal, the ministry has put in place a robust vaccine deployment and tracking system to ensure transparency and accountability.

Kenya received 1.02 million doses of the Covid-19 Astrazeneca vaccine on March 3 and an additional 100,000 doses of the same from the Indian government.

“We are very alive to the issues that arose last year about this whole thing called KEMSA saga so for us it is important to retain a very high level of transparency and accountability so we don’t jump right back,” Health CS Mutahi Kagwe said.

“We know how suspicious everybody is that the slightest insinuation that there is something you can be sure that it becomes another scam so to speak. So that is why even the distribution is so detailed so that we can literary give the names of the persons who are going to be vaccinated,” he added.

On arrival at the JKIA, the vaccines were taken to the National vaccines depot in Kitengela.

The national depot is now given 24 hours police protection with the distribution to the nine regional vaccine stores also given police escort to weed off any dubious dealings.

With the Kenya Chanjo system, upon delivery from the Central store to the regional stores, deliveries are entered by batch number to the regional stores and as counties draw from the regional stores there has to be an entry at the end into the Chanjo system at the regional stores.

Once vaccination is done the batch number is entered against each vaccine to enable ease of traceability through the batch numbers up to the vaccinee.

“The system is almost ready and it is going to have a pre-registration module from this week so that somebody can book via phone the date he or she wants to get vaccinated,” head of Taskforce on vaccines deployment Dr Willis Akhwale said.

The vaccines are also subject to an audit by GAVI itself. The vaccines received under the Covax facility programme have a short expiry (expiry date is June 28) and a short expiry upon opening of a vial as they cannot be used six hours after the opening of the vial.

“So GAVI will audit but our responsibility as Kenya will be to account for every dose. We did consider these wastages in our planning so that we get doses that will meet our targets,” Akhwale said.

“But I have to mention that given the nature of expiry if we have a queue of six people and a vial is due for 10 people and nobody shows up during that period then we are going to lose those dosages because it can’t be viable after six hours.”

Within two days after the vaccines were received into the country, distribution was effected to all the nine regional stores and by Saturday, March 6 even the furthest counties like Mandera had received their doses.

Form March 8 the counties started drawing their allocations and by March 10 23 counties started vaccinating, and by March 12 were vaccinating and by Tuesday of this week, all the counties were vaccinating and reporting to the Chanjo system.

The government plans to scale up the vaccination campaign by increasing the number of vaccination centres from the current 47 government health facilities with an additional 622 private and faith-based facilities.

Already, training for the staff to administer the jab in these facilities including the support and IT is scheduled to start this week with every staff expected to be trained on how to put data into the digital platform.

“During the first three days more than 9,100 people were vaccinated and from Monday we have seen a steady increase of about 4,000 so we are going to see a scale up on the numbers that are being vaccinated,” the medic said.

To date, more than 28,000 frontline workers have been reached with the jab since the rollout.