TALAKAG, Bukidnon ― With only a few days left before the September 30 deadline, health authorities here are working double time to meet its vaccination target amid the vaccination hesitancy among their lumad senior citizens.
Talakag health officer Mark Anthony Dano said they may not hit the 63,000 targets they have set by September 30.
Dano said they have inoculated 84 percent of their target but lagged behind vaccinating senior citizens, especially the lumad elderly.
“Kulelat kami sa senior citizens especially among the lumad. There is strong resistance to the vaccine from the lumad senior citizens,” Dano said.
Dano said of the 5,300 lumad seniors in the municipality of Talakag, only 3,000 are fully vaccinated and only 700 elderlies have been inoculated with the first booster shot.
The World Health Organization in the Philippines has expressed alarm about the sluggish Covid-19 vaccination rate among senior citizens nationwide and is worried that a surge of cases among the elderly would affect the country’s hospital system.
It said only 6.4 million senior citizens or 25 percent of the vulnerable sector have been fully vaccinated despite efforts by local government units.
At the health center in Talakag poblacion, employees were busy putting up tarps as part of the information drive for the five-day “Bakunang Bayan” vaccination campaign last Monday.
Nurses and doctors were attending to a small crowd of residents who came to be vaccinated but senior citizens were inconspicuously absent.
“We have no problem with the younger population. It is a different story and we are worried about the risks,” Dano said.
He said they tried new tactics — like offering a P300 meal allowance for every senior- as an incentive for the elderly to be vaccinated.
Dano said they are also resorting to a house-to-house campaign to get the senior citizens vaccinated or boosted.
“All of these failed. It seems the lumad elders are stubborn enough that they rejected even the meal allowance we offered,” he said.
The town of Talakag is a first-class town in Bukidnon province. Its population of 77,000 residents is mostly a mix of the Higaonon and Talaandig tribes.
Dano said misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccines is the main cause for the hesitancy among its senior citizens.
“The lumad has this belief that Covid-19 vaccines are harmful to their health. Some of them believed they will get sick if they are vaccinated and some even think they will turn into zombies,” Dano said.
Dano said the lumad tribal councils in Talakag even issued certificates that exempt its members from the Covid-19 vaccination. He said the health officials do not honor them.
He said they tried everything including engaging Peace Crops, an NGO, which produced a variety of information materials like posters, tarpaulins, and comics in Higaonon dialect.
The materials were distributed in barangays Tikalaan, Indulang, Lantud, and San Rafael, which has mostly Higaonon residents.
The NGO strategy is that the key to overcoming vaccine hesitancy among the lumad is a Higaonon-centered and Higaonon-led communication campaign.
Peace Crops president Robert de la Serna said they were able to gain support and participation by featuring Higaonon leaders who have been inoculated in the tarpaulins and posters.
De la Serna said the message in the informational materials has a simple message in the Higaonon dialect: vaccines are safe.
Department of Health representative Jasper Ola said health officials used Higaonon leaders effectively in their campaign in Malitbog, another municipality of Bukidnon.
This, aside from the one sack of rice they gave as an incentive for the Higaonon residents to come to the health centers, according to Ola.
“Once you earned the trust of their leaders, the rest of the Higaonon residents will follow,” Ola said.
Higaonon leader Rose Undag said the resistance is strong among the elders because the idea of vaccination is not part of their oral history and tradition.
“We do not even have a word for vaccination in our dialect. Our elders do not understand its importance to their health,” Undag said.
Undag said Higaonon people resort to medicinal plants when they get sick with illness and trust Magbabaya ( Supreme Creator) would heal them.
She said her people would seek the treatment of modern medicine as their last resort.
Undag said when the Covid-19 pandemic ravaged urban cities; many Higaonon communities refrained from socializing with the people living in urban metros.
“The elders were lucky that most of the local government units implemented strict quarantine measures, “ said Undag who is fully vaxxed and has already been done with two booster shots.
On the other hand, Undag said young Higaonon are also scared by the side effects of the vaccine, pointing out fevers and chills experienced after being inoculated.
She said the young Higaonons who are mostly working on the farms are afraid they would get sick after being vaccinated.
“They cannot afford to be absent from their work even for a single day. It would mean miss meals for their families,” Undag said.
Undag said these are the deep-rooted problems that beset the Covid-19 vaccination program among the Higaonons in the mountains of Bukidnon.
(This report was produced through a story grant from the Philippine Press Institute under the auspices of the Hanns Seidel Foundation. The theme of the journalism fellowship is governance and health.)
