The Vietnamese Ministry of Health has set up 11 working teams to supervise vaccination at all levels and localities nationwide as part of its efforts to improve the efficiency of the national expanded immunization program and regain public confidence into the program. These teams will focus on supervising free and full-cost vaccination programs and the results of the expanded measles-rubella vaccination campaign, the Vietnam News Agency said on Mar 11. The ministry stated that the national free vaccination program to prevent communicable diseases have already provided 35-40 million inoculations and benefited 1.6 million newborn babies so far. Local parents have been rushing to take their children to medical centers for full-cost vaccinations, instead of free ones for fear of low-quality vaccines in the program following recent Quinvaxem vaccine-related deaths. This trend has resulted in recent serious shortage of unsubsidized vaccines across the country while subsidized vaccines always have enough in stock. Tran Dac Phu, chief of the ministry’s preventive health department, has recently said that suppliers so far have pledged to provide Vietnam with 530,000 doses of pentavalent and hexavalent vaccines this year, which is just enough for over 170,000 babies. Compared to the national demand, the supply is simply too low, Dr. Phu said. Nguyen Tat Dat, deputy chief of the ministry’s Drug Administration, warned that parents who insist on having their children vaccinated at unsubsidized clinics and decide to wait will put the kids at risks of being exposed to diseases like the whooping cough, which reportedly sickened at least nine children in the northern region in January. After three years of relative quiet, measles reemerged with vengeance in Vietnam early last year, with thousands of children in 61 out of 63 provinces and cities nationwide infected and more than a hundred of them died. The situation was attributed to the fact that parents have been reluctant to vaccinate their children due to the Quinvaxem vaccine incident. Though Quinvaxem, which is freely provided in the national immunization program, does not contain measles vaccination, coverage of the related deaths has still swayed parents from vaccinating their children. (VietnamPlus Mar 10)
