Doctors’ Association Kashmir (DAK) on Wednesday said vaccine is the only way to stop the prevailing COVID-19 pandemic.
“Vaccinations would bring an end to this ongoing public health crisis,” President DAK and influenza expert Dr Nisar ul Hassan said in a statement.
He said that in order to get back to normal, we need enough people to get vaccinated adding “the sooner we get more people vaccinated, the sooner we start reliving our lives.”
The DAK President said that “if people want business as usual, their kids back in school and playing sport, they should roll up their sleeves and get Covid-19 vaccine”.
He said that COVID-19 vaccine is the “biggest gift science has provided to humankind”.
The discovery of a “safe and effective” vaccine in less than a year, he said, “is an extraordinary achievement in the history of science.”
Dr Nisar said vaccines are one of the great modern triumphs of public health and are the best tools to prevent disease and death while referring to how vaccines had eradicated diseases like smallpox and polio.
“We have the vaccine now. We can breathe collective sigh of relief,” Dr Nisar said.
The DAK President said that the COVID-19 vaccine would protect people from infection and prevent from getting seriously ill even if one gets the virus.
Getting vaccinated will also protect people around us, particularly people at increased risk of severe illness from Covid-19, he said.
He suggested that there was a need to build trust in people about the safety, effectiveness and importance of the vaccine.
The DAK President said that “thousands of healthcare workers in Kashmir have received the shot and no major adverse effect has been reported.”
He urged authorities to crack down on those who spread rumors and misinformation about vaccine saying that people “need to be booked for promoting anti-vaccination propaganda and there is an urgent need to penalize social networking sites for uploading false information regarding the vaccine”.
“Misinformation has the potential to create public skepticism over Covid-19 vaccine which could undermine our fight against the Coronavirus pandemic,” said Dr Nisar.