Vaccine hesitancy posing challenges in fight against outbreak

Vaccine hesitancy is currently running high in Turkey and creating serious risks at a time when the virus cases continue to hover at record levels in the country, experts have warned.

Some 25 percent of the people who are entitled to receive COVID-19 jabs are avoiding the inoculation and most of those are women, according to experts.

Turkey rolled out its vaccination program on Jan. 14. To date, it has administered nearly 18.9 million doses of the vaccine, with over 11 million people having received the first dose of the jab. Over 7.6 million people have received both doses.

The country started the inoculations with the jab the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac produced, but recently it also began administering the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

People need to arrange an appointment online or through hotlines to get a shot. Once the appointment is missed, people have to wait maybe for months.

"The main reason behind avoiding the vaccine is fear. Because of false formation circulating around, people believe the jab has side effects while another reason is the anti-vaccination sentiments," said experts.

This 25 percent rate is quite high, efforts are needed to tell people why the vaccination is important, they added. Experts also noted that people are showing complacent behavior after receiving the shot but stressed that the immunity starts to kick in 40 days after the second dose.

Turkey needs to administer at least 5 million doses of the vaccine each week and the vaccination rate should be more than 75 percent to achieve herd immunity, said Professor Mehmet Ceyhan from Hacettepe University in Ankara, stressing the vaccine hesitancy must be overcome to meet targets set for the summer.

Summer targets<...