‘Vaccines don’t kill, they protect lives’
Keletso Thobega | Thursday June 12, 2025 12:34
A budget of $638 million has been allocated for this project. The key areas that the SLL will focus on include improving healthcare workforce, refining diagnostics and vaccines, and partnerships to support primary healthcare.
The objectives of SLLs include increasing adult vaccination and life course immunisation policies and programming tools.
The guiding principles of the SLLs are firstly, inclusivity, to include all African countries particularly African Union member states, in health response programmes.
The second objective is equity, whose aim is to reflect on countries' circumstances and needs, and in terms of accountability, use resources appropriately, efficiently and transparently.
The pillars include inter-country logistics; safety surveillance; genomic sequence; technical assistance and data collection and sharing.
When giving an overview of SSLD Phase 2 recently, acting director of Science and innovation at Africa CDC, Dr. Mosoka Fallah pointed out that Phase 1 was focused on getting COVID-19 vaccines and building the capacity of Africa CDC, which was established in 2017. Fallah shared that 37 million people have been vaccinated for COVID-19 in Africa through Phase 1, and that is encouraging.
He noted that going forward, the aim is to integrate immunisation into primary health care, integrate it with strengthening health systems without waiting first for health outbreaks and pandemics and assimilating routine immunisation in most communities.
“It is important to improve capacity of health systems in Africa,” he said.
He emphasised that stakeholders should not work in silos but prioritise community engagement to prevent diseases and manage health outbreaks and pandemics.
Fallah noted that some of the achievements of SLL Phase 1 are that 35 million Africans were vaccinated for COVID-19 which translates to 70% coverages of target populations.
On the other hand, there were 106 new in-country staff; Africa CDC established data sharing agreements while two million doses were disbursed and 38,000 health workers were trained.
It also saw an increase in genomic sequence laboratories and tightened diplomatic and country support as well as proactive engagement and knowledge sharing on health responses.
The Africa Centre for Disease Control (Africa CDC) has developed a model that strives to improve health outbreak surveillance and response mechanisms across Africa.
Africa CDC has the mandate to improve the health status of Africa. The health responses have been integrated in the Agenda 2063 (Aspiration 1) and Africa Health Strategy and the Africa Youth Health order.
Africa is faced with a challenge of vaccine hesitancy and Dr. Patrick Chanda Kwande said the most important thing is protecting lives, noting that biologically, the human body is capable of receiving as many vaccines as possible.
Kwande also noted that risk communication and community engagement are important because there are pervasive myths in Africa such as that vaccines are not good and kill people.
“Vaccines do not kill people...they are not manufactured to cause harm... they are meant to protect people's lives,” he said.
Kwande also debunked claims that Covid19 is gone, explaining that vaccination had helped to decrease cases but that COVID-19 is still amongst us and there are still diagnoses and hospitalisations, although on a smaller scale.
Adequately addressing the pervasive health challenges across Africa requires more than just increased health personnel, but also more public education on health preventative measures and community health outreach in order to arrest health problems as they occur.
Dr. John Ojo, senior monitoring, evaluation and learning officer of the SLL project reiterated that it is important to continuously monitor the impact of vaccines and other health interventions.
He expressed support for the sovereignty of health systems in Africa, noting that developments such as roads, solar etc, had made it easier to reach the most remote communities across Africa.
He also noted that data collection should be integrated into routine health systems for sustainability and cost effectiveness. He said that quality monitoring and evaluation would mostly ensure that “health systems are better prepared for future pandemics and that vaccine uptakes are higher and have more coverage.”
He said that pharma-vigilance is important for monitoring diagnostic systems and offering immunisation support and genomics sequencing, adding that they have started using infodemics to engage experts.