Fear of Covid-19 vaccines hampers fight against virus in rural India

Health workers are facing an uphill battle to defeat conspiracy theories in India’s rural hinterland When health worker Neelam Kumari knocks on doors in Indian villages the occupants sometimes run out the back, terrified that she wants to vaccinate them against Covid-19. With India’s devastating recent virus surge easing in cities, the deadly pandemic is ravaging the vast poverty-stricken rural hinterland. But here, ignorance and fear rule. “A lot of people in my village don’t want to take the vaccine. They fear that they will die if they take it,” Ms Kumari told AFP in Dhatrath, a collection of two-storey buildings in Haryana state, with buffaloes wandering the streets. “One of the villagers was so angry that he beat up a [health] worker who was trying to convince him to take the vaccine.” Just 15 per cent of people in rural areas, compared with 30 per cent in towns and cities, have received at least one vaccine dose so far – even though two-thirds of cases are being reported in the countryside, according to an analysis by The Hindu newspaper. Rumours are shared online or spread through messaging apps like WhatsApp. Fears that 5G causes Covid-19 led to mobile towers being attacked in Haryana. “People do not even step forward for testing as they think the government will declare them Covid-positive even if they are not,” Shoeb Ali, a doctor in Miyaganj village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, said. This fear pervades despite the sight of bodies dumped in rivers and hundreds of shallow graves suggesting that Covid-19 is raging in India’s hinterland where 70 per cent of the 1.3-billion population lives. In Nuran Khera village in Haryana, residents are reluctant to get inoculated even though they said many households reported having fever – and dozens of people dying. “Even after opening up a vaccine centre here, nobody is ready to take it,” villager Rajesh Kumar, 45, said. “I won’t take the vaccine because it has many side effects. People get sick after getting vaccines.” In other states, reports have emerged of people jumping into rivers or fleeing into forests just to escape mobile health teams. Hom Kumari, a health worker at Bhatau Jamalpur village in Uttar Pradesh, said some locals seemed impossible to convince. “What do we tell someone who says, ‘If I’m destined to live, I will, even without the vaccine’?,” she asked. Health facilities are also few and far between and some people believe that going to a public hospital is more dangerous than staying away. “People who went to hospital never came back,” another villager in Nuran Khera, who gave his first name as Kuldip, said.