By Sydney Kimiywi
The government is targeting over 800,000 KCSE school leavers for Covid-19 vaccination as part of its strategy to attain vaccination of half the teenage population aged between 15-17 years by the end of the year.
The Principal Secretary Ministry of Health (MoH) Susan Mochache urged parents and guardians to encourage teenagers to get vaccinated as a way of protecting the most vulnerable citizens against Covid-19.
The PS made the appeal when she presided over the official launch of the accelerated Covid-19 vaccination campaign in Kibra, Nairobi on June 2nd.
The six weeks campaign is jointly conducted by MoH and the Nairobi Metropolitan Services (NMS) with support from WHO, UNICEF and USAid.
The PS was flanked by NMS Medical Director Dr Ouma Oluga.
The PS said the government targets to vaccinate 100% of the adult population and 50% of the teenage population by December this year.
Currently 8.7 million Kenyans are fully vaccinated translating to 31% of the population.
PS Mochache hailed Nairobi County for attaining the second-best coverage nationally at 48.8% of adults. In addition, at least 115,000 persons have received booster doses.
Despite these gains, the PS regretted that there remains a large population that is unvaccinated.
“We need to reach an additional 1.5 million adults and to vaccinate 300,000 teenagers in Nairobi. We have recently witnessed an increase in reported cases of Covid-19 and the high population density in Nairobi poses the risk of propagation of another pandemic wave,” she noted.
Since 12th March 2020 when the first case of Covid-19 was reported in Kenya, MoH has reported a total of 324,976 cases and 5,651 fatalities.
To scale up the fight against the pandemic, MoH has mobilised and trained Health Promotion and Community health teams while engagement of communities such as religious leaders, school management, transport sector and women and youth groups is ongoing in all counties.
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