ISLAMABAD: Is it affordable? Is there a vaccination center close by? Is the purpose to eliminate Islam? Does more charity help stave off disease?
These were some of the questions about COVID-19 vaccines that residents of the Pakistani capital raised this week in interviews with Arab News when asked if they would get vaccinated given the opportunity — with a majority of respondents saying they were open to being inoculated. 
Though Pakistan’s COVID-19 vaccination drive has been underway since February, with health care workers as priority, a poll of medical workers conducted by Gallup Pakistan and a national physicians’ association last month showed that just over half of Pakistan’s health workers had received a COVID-19 shot by the first week or March and nearly half had concerns over China’s Sinopharm, the only vaccine available in Pakistan so far. 
Another Gallup poll released in January said 49% Pakistanis said they would not get the vaccine even if it were free.
But in Islamabad this week, seven out of ten people interviewed said they would take the vaccine if given an opportunity. The three respondents who said they did not want to be vaccinated, however, said the vaccine should be administered to those who had contracted the virus, indicating that they did not understand that a vaccine was a preventive, rather than a curative, measure. 
“If given the opportunity to get vaccinated then we would like to avail it,” said Shahmim Bibi, a 50-year-old housewife who was shopping in Islamabad’s middle-income Aabpara neighborhood. “If it’s affordable and a center is close by, then I would get it [vaccine].”
When asked if she had a message for people concerned about possible “adverse side effects” of the vaccine, Bibi said: “If it’s [vaccine] harmful, then why are they giving it to doctors? No such thing would come into Pakistan that is harmful to its people.”
Pakistan on Wednesday received 500,000 doses of China’s Sinopharm vaccine, bringing the country’s total supply to one million shots — all of them donations. The South Asian nation of 220 million people launched a COVID-19 vaccination campaign for the public on March 10, starting with the elderly. 
Virus infection numbers have also sharply risen this month in the majority Muslim nation that has had a problematic history with vaccination, and where vaccine misinformation and mistrust is rampant.
Indeed, polio vaccination drives in Pakistan — the only country besides Afghanistan where the disease is still endemic — have had to grapple with militant attacks and conspiracy theories that the shots are a Western ploy to sterilize Muslims.
“According to our standpoint, the [coronavirus] vaccine should not be taken,” a customer at a bakery who only gave his first name, Rauf, told Arab News. “Because according to the culture surrounding the polio vaccine .. if its purpose is not to eliminate the disease but to eliminate Islam, then it should not be taken.”
Another resident who preferred not to be vaccinated, Aftiaz Abbasi, said it was because he had not come in contact with anyone who had gotten the disease and hence he did not need to be inoculated. 
“I will not take [the vaccine],” Abbasi said. “I do not need it because Alhamdulillah no one from our village has contracted corona[virus].”
Abbasi added that it was god, not vaccines, that protected against viruses, saying moving away from religion and an overindulgence in “worldly deeds” exposed people to dangers such as disease. 
A daily wage laborer who only gave his first name, Saleem, said he was in good health and did not need the vaccine, urging people to be more charitable and take care of the poor as this would help eliminate the coronavirus. ​
“Zakat and charity,” he said, “they can eat up a thousand demons. And they will eat up this [coronavirus] also. If there is more charity, if there is more care taken of poor people, automatically this affliction will leave us. I have faith in this.”
But others said it was the responsibility of citizens to get vaccinated when they knew COVID-19, a highly contagious disease, was killing millions of people around the world.
“I will definitely get it [vaccinated],” Muhammad Riaz, a 63-ear-old bookseller in Islamabad’s upmarket F-6 neighborhood, told Arab News. “People are dying a lot because of coronavirus, getting affected … if this medicine has come for humans, then we will definitely take it, and everyone should take it.”
When asked about vaccine hesitancy due to possible “harmful effects” of the vaccine, Riaz referred to a Phase III clinical trial for a Chinese vaccine candidate at Islamabad’s Shifa International Hospital, saying there were no reports of adverse side effects among the thousands who had participated in the program. 
“So if this [vaccine] is coming [to Pakistan] so we can eliminate a disease,” Riaz said, “then people should definitely take it.”