The first Covid-19 Vaccine-Pfizer/Biontech-was authorised by the World Health Organisation on December 11, 2020.

But it was still too far for a resident of a small East African country like Rwanda to dream of getting jabbed.

Firstly, because the pandemic had affected the national economy which would otherwise be used to acquire the vaccines and second, due to the vaccine monopoly which was making news around the globe.

Rich countries were buying all the vaccines leaving behind the developing ones. For example, Canada had enough vaccines to inoculate four times its size by December 2020.

However, little did the Rwandans know that in less than 10 weeks, Rwanda could be administering the first Covid-19 vaccines to its residents, later on making it the second Sub-Saharan country to inoculate the highest proportion of its population.

As of December 2, 2021, Rwanda had received more than 12.9 million vaccines that had been fully administered to 4,805,163 people while 7,241,479 received the first dose of the vaccine.

The vaccines were acquired from the government’s budget, donations or Covax facility which is a global initiative that aims at accelerating fair and equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines.

Types of vaccines administered in Rwanda include but are not limited to Pfizer/Biontech, Oxford AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Sinopharm and Moderna vaccines among others.

At the beginning of the year, the arrival of vaccines was one of the most anticipated news in Rwanda as the virus kept wreaking havoc in all sectors of the economy.

In this article, we will be looking at the developments that shaped the vaccine development throughout 2021:

In the first place, Rwanda had few means to accommodate the storage of vaccines, but the government made sure to have them prior to receiving the first round.

Case in point, prior to the vaccination roll out, the government purchased over five freezers that can go up to minus eighty degrees to accommodate the storage of some vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna.

They were purchased a few days before Kigali was placed under its second lockdown that was caused by the Covid-19 wave pushed by the 2020 festive seasons.

Rwanda received the first round of Covid-19 jabs in Mid-February 2021. Initially, high-risk groups like the essential workers in the health and security sectors were the targets.

Other essential workers who were vaccinated in the first round of essential workers included security personnel, teachers, refugees and asylum seekers hosted in Rwanda, inmates, and people aged 65 and above, as well as those with underlying medical conditions.

After the inoculation of essential workers that saw over 230,000 people obtain their first dose, the head of state and first lady also took the step to get vaccinated as a symbol to call upon all Rwandans to embrace the vaccination campaign.

Meanwhile, mass vaccination activities were being conducted in line with mass testing in public places like streets, schools and other areas to make surveillance for disease control.

Rwanda Biomedical Centre also employed a technology of using sniffer dogs to test the Covid-19 patients in this same year.

In late May, the second dose of the vaccine was administered to over 350,000 people who had received the first dose.

Since then –early June- the second mass vaccination kick-started, targeting elderly personnel, as people above 75 in Kigali and upcountry were the biggest targets but an important emphasis was put on Kigali city which incurs movement from all over the country.

During that time, Covid-19 cases had fallen from February 2021 to July, until Rwanda underwent a third wave of the pandemic incurred by the eruption of Covid-19 delta cases variant on the continent.

So, RBC started calling for awareness-raising campaigns, deploying doctors in the most hit regions like the South and the West.

But that did not help much until the city of Kigali and eight other districts with an intense effect of the disease were placed under a 10-days lockdown Since July 15.

On August 1, the lockdown was lifted and targeted vaccination groups now moved to people with at least 40 years of age, and for this time, the health workers started finding them in their homes.

In late August, the third mass vaccination kick-started on youths from 18 years of age which prompted Rwanda to reach the World Health Organisation’s global target of vaccinating ten per cent of its population in September 2021.

Meanwhile, as the vaccination campaigns were spreading out in different corners of Rwanda, the gospel that Rwanda was selected to host the vaccine manufacturing factory also broke news, making headlines around the continent.

The country was selected alongside South Africa and Senegal.

The last group to be tackled in a wide mass vaccination campaign by December 2021 was the inoculation of 12 years old and above children, who were mostly high school students.

The move raised Rwanda’s Covid-19 vaccination targets from 7.8 to 9 million people by June 2022.

One of the last moves in this year was the administration of the Covid-19 booster dose and as of December 20, up to 28,562 people had obtained the shot.

On the other side, the year ended with the birth of another highly contagious variant, Omicron, causing Rwanda to tighten covid-19 measures in the wake of the highly contagious novel variant.  

Rwanda has set the target to vaccinate 9 million of its residents (69.4 percent) by June 2022.

‘Vaccines mean life’

During the administration of vaccines, Rwanda Biomedical Center created a Twitter hashtag Ikingoniubuzima which literally means vaccines means life.

It testified to the greater role the vaccines are set to play in this fight: In the first months of 2021, Flavipiravir drug was often used to cure mild cases of Covid-19, and it proved to be effective.

But the administration of vaccines did a lot more to effectively reduce the number of critical cases of Covid-19, according to Mennelas Nkeshimana, an epidemiologist and one of the Covid-19 frontline workers.

"Vaccines played a very important role in the fight against Covid-19, and more people need to embrace it,” he said.

"When the rollout began, patients drastically decreased and our health system was not overloaded”.

He then commends Rwandan residents for their obedience to the measures, which he says, are better than most other African countries.

Most people await the year 2022 for all countries that had been overtaken by the drug to catch up, meanwhile for Rwanda, it is the year of achieving the 69.4 per cent target.

Kigali residents turn up for Covid 19  vaccination exercise at Kigali Special Economic Zone on March 13, 2021 .Photo by Craish Bahizi