Legislators and their families are getting vaccinated and are being allowed to choose between the AstraZeneca and Sinopharm vaccines despite the Health Ministry’s repeated statements that people will have no say in which shots they receive.

“Egypt currently has stocks of the Sinopharm and AstraZeneca vaccines. Each legislator and their family can choose which vaccine they want to take,” the deputy chair of House of Representatives Budget and Planning Committee Yasser Omar tells Mada Masr. 

“My wife and daughter were administered the vaccine two days ago at Parliament after the doctor let them choose between AstraZeneca and Sinpopharm. They chose Sinopharm, while my inoculation was postponed because I contracted the coronavirus two months ago,” Omar says.

Seven other MPs who spoke to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity confirm that MPs are being allowed to choose which vaccine to take for themselves and their families. 

The vaccination of House and Senate members began in mid-April, prompted by a request to vaccinate legislators put forward by the House Speaker Hanafy Gebaly after MP Mostafa Bakry led efforts calling for suspending House sessions until MPs were to be inoculated. 

Within 24 hours, the prime minister ordered the Health Ministry to begin vaccinating MPs on April 11 with Senators getting their first shots on April 13.  

The prime minister’s order provided for the inoculation of all MPs regardless of their age or whether they have chronic health conditions. Gebaly cited a need to allow MPs to do their jobs properly, which includes interacting with large numbers of citizens. 

The swift and effective inoculation of the MPs is drawing criticism from the Doctors Syndicate, as the vaccination rate for doctors and medical professionals remains low. Syndicate board member Dr. Iman Salama blasts the privileged treatment for MPs in comments to Mada Masr, describing it as “one of the symptoms of the failure of the vaccine distribution system in Egypt,” where the the majority of doctors working in public hospitals under the jurisdiction of the Health Ministry are yet to be vaccinated despite being a high risk category. To date, at least 469 doctors have died of COVID-19, including 55 in the past two weeks.

On Tuesday, the general secretary of the syndicate, Dr. Osama Abdel Hay, also expressed concern about the slow vaccination rate, calling for the government to revise its vaccination plans and measures to ramp up shots for medical staff. Abdel Hay also called on the Health Ministry to release an official count of the number of doctors who have been innoculated so far.

“The vaccine is a right for everyone, but due to its scarcity the state must begin with the most deserving groups, whether they are working in high exposure contexts, such as doctors, or those at high risk of serious complications, such as those with chronic conditions,” says Salama.

The syndicate called on the ministry twice in the last month to ramp up the vaccination of doctors, offering to prepare local syndicate offices across the nation to distribute the vaccine to address the slow roll-out and the crowdedness in the official vaccination centers. However, the ministry did not respond, Salama tells Mada Masr. 

The ministry is not following a “clear, well-defined plan” to inoculate doctors, says Salama, pointing at how the vaccines were initially made available only for medical staff in chest, fever, and teaching hospitals. Medical staff in other hospitals, however, were told to sign up for the online registration system — which has been plagued by delays in allocating inoculation appointments — alongside other priority and non-priority groups, contributing to wait times of up to a month for doctors in some governorates. 

“Our biggest hope now is that the ministry agrees to provide the shots in the local branches, choosing between the two available vaccines is now the furthest thing from our wishes,” says Salama.

The public vaccine rollout to wider populations, including the elderly, began in early March, and, as of April 15, over 1 million people out of Egypt’s population of 100 million have registered to get COVID-19 vaccines and 350,000 people, including medical staff, have been vaccinated.