Director of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina Institute of Public Health Davor Pehar said today in Sarajevo that the first vaccines against Covid-19 in FBiH should arrive at the end of this, or the beginning of next month. These will be Pfizer vaccines, and the public health institutes in FBiH are ready to start the vaccination process.
After a meeting on the start of vaccination activities attended by representatives of the FBiH Public Health Institute, the FBiH Ministry of Health and the FBiH cantonal public health institutions, Pehar said that they still have no precise information on the arrival of the quantities but that it should be between five and ten thousand doses.
The citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina still do not have official information about vaccines that should come to our country in the coming period. For now, the promotion of vaccination is taking place behind closed doors, and the authorities say that a detailed plan will be presented soon.
In the meantime, citizens are educating themselves, on social networks and the Internet. A video intended to inform the public how to properly greet each other during the BH pandemic is presented to the public by the leaders of the Federal Institute of Public Health, via social media, 15 days ago. And nothing would be disputable if the pandemic had not erupted for almost a year. And an even bigger task is yet to come – the promotion of immunization. As we don’t have a vaccine yet – and we’re late there, BHRT writes.
The first phase is the education of health workers.
Rifat Rijad Zaid, President of the Trade Union of Doctors of Medicine and Dentistry of FBiH says: “I think that training is primarily about storing vaccines, because it’s a vaccine that requires one cold chain. This would be the first vaccine to arrive in BiH.
“Our workers are also people who have been vaccinating against seasonal flu and regular vaccinations for decades, and I think that vaccinations alone will not be a problem, and the training can be completed in a couple of hours,” said Zaid.
It is precisely health workers and various video materials that should be included in the second phase, ie to promote the importance of vaccination to citizens, they say in the Institute of Public Health of the Federation of BiH. But we will wait for that. Although the plan is ready and the document exists, we will be informed in the near future, because everything is going in stages and will depend on the influx of vaccines.
Head of the Health Promotion and Education Service of the Public Health Institute Aida Ramic Catak says that through adequate messages and communication channels, citizens will be informed about why the vaccine is needed, the composition of the vaccine, the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine.
Experts say we should have known all this by now. Unfortunately, the population is only educated, most often, through social networks and the Internet, where anti-vaccination lobbies are very strong. The authorities were the ones, especially the entities, who already needed to give us the right information instead of speculation.
