Protected
What drives those saying yes to the vaccination
- Available in:
- Українська
- English
To hug one’s granddaughter. To see the faces of one’s parishioners. To take off your lab coat at the end of the working day, and not burn the midnight oil. Everyone who was vaccinated against COVID-19 had their reasons for doing so. We have collected four stories of the Ukrainians from different parts of the country who are convinced: there are more reasons to fear the consequences of the disease than the myths about the vaccines.
“Do not lose any more people”
She still remembers with horror the time when her town was suffering terribly from the coronavirus—and fears that it could happen again. When Kosiv in the Ivano-Frankivsk region was hit by the pandemic, 41-year-old nurse Natalia Likhosherstova was working “on the front lines”—making rounds between three dozen patient beds, giving them medicines, and helping them breathe. She joined other nurses calling on healthcare workers to help with patient triage. When she saw the queues of people suffering from pneumonia having to wait outside in -15 degrees, she asked the military to set up a tent where nurses could test the patients. She mourned the losses: at that time she lost a colleague to COVID. Natalia was never quite able to recover. She always hoped that one day scientists would invent a vaccine—and the world would go back to normal.
Natalia knows a lot about vaccines. Over her 20 years of heading a medical and obstetric center, she gave more than a thousand vaccinations to infants and the elderly. For a long time she was afraid to get vaccinated against hepatitis B and also discouraged her relatives, and now she recognizes it as her biggest mistake. Back in her university days, there was insufficient verified data about the vaccine, but myths and horror stories spread like wildfire. The situation changed when she joined a UNICEF training program—after that she got vaccinated herself and vaccinated the whole family. She started thinking: how much harm did her ignorance do?
She avoided the same mistake with the COVID vaccine. After all she had been through in the hospital, she knew full well how important the vaccination was.
“If only we could go back to normal life. I want to see people smiling without masks; I want to visit them, to hug each other. I do not want to lose more people—I want to reach herd immunity and live a normal life”.
The orphaned church
Sickness and faith always stand side by side. Yet, with the outbreak of the pandemic, people of faith were forced to stay far away from their places of worship. At one point, the clergy was preaching sermons that no one could hear but them. And now in confessionals they are separated by bars, a layer of plastic and medical masks, behind which they can barely see the eyes of their parishioners. This is how 62-year-old Father Mykhailo Dymyd, a priest of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and Professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University, remembers his church with the arrival of COVID. He serves in one of the largest parishes in Lviv—in the church of Saint Volodymyr and Saint Olga.
“Before the coronavirus pandemic, between five and seven thousand people would attend our Sunday liturgies. When quarantine restrictions and the strict lockdown were imposed last spring, a maximum of ten people were allowed to gather. It was so strange to come to an empty church—it was like the church had been orphaned”.
What helped combat this feeling of orphanhood was the realization that the pandemic, like every other challenge thrown at us by the winds of fate, had a deep meaning—to make people stronger, to teach them the principle of solidarity with others. This realization was deepened by the fact that he himself was tried hard by coronavirus that winter, and was even hospitalized. He says it makes it easier for him to empathize with those people who have also faced the disease and need his support.
With a full understanding of how much suffering the disease brings to people, with faith in God and herd immunity, he and his entire family got vaccinated as soon as they started mass vaccinating the clergy in Ukraine. He had many reasons for that.
“In addition to looking after my own health, I want there to be more people in Ukraine who are aware of the importance of herd immunity. In addition, I got vaccinated to be able to help others. Getting vaccinated means developing a conscientious civil society. This is when people think not only about their selfish needs, but about society in general”.
Get your freedom back
For the first three months of the quarantine, 28-year-old Yaroslava did not leave her house. And she would not have, if it were not for the need to visit a doctor. During the year, when several of her acquaintances passed away from COVID, the fear of getting sick intensified. Occasionally she would take a walk around her apartment building, always wearing a mask. When outside, she flatly forbade people to approach her. She went for walks with a visiting friend while keeping a safe distance. Other friends and acquaintances stopped meeting up with the girl at that time, as they were afraid to infect her: it became known that COVID-19 can lead to increased blood sugar levels.
Yaroslava Sheremeta has diabetes. When other people get a common cold once a season, she can get sick three times, because the daily struggle with sugar levels depletes the body and leaves it too weak to fight off other diseases. Tired of the constant fear of the disease, isolation from her loved ones, and listening to stories about critical blood sugar levels in diabetic patients who have COVID while waiting to see her doctor at the hospital, Yaroslava was looking forward to the vaccination more than her birthday. Back in the fall, she went to her GP and said that she was ready to be vaccinated at any time, and from time to time she would remind the doctor that she was waiting. She had to wait until the end of April, when she was finally vaccinated with the first dose, and could breathe a huge sigh of relief.
Smiling under her mask, she left the doctor’s office—she says the vaccine was the only way for her to regain her freedom. It enabled her to reconnect with the world and finally overcome her fear.
A lesson from Lyubov
With each passing day of the lockdown, Lyubov’s anxiety levels increased, forcing her to try everything she could, even meditating and chanting mantras. She was searching for inner peace. Yet her pulse, which she controlled through meditation, increased again at the thought of her students, whom she had not seen face to face for a long time, and her husband, who was working in the mine while she was cut off from the world in her apartment.
The uncertainty was the most frightening—at the beginning of the pandemic, it was not yet clear how events would unfold, how to protect herself and her family from the virus, and when the schools would reopen. Lyubov Eichman, 55, is a primary school teacher in the village of Balky, Zaporizhzhia region. When the schools reopened after the strict lockdown, she was afraid of bringing the disease to class—she understood how much responsibility she bore and continued to adhere to the lockdown restrictions. Despite that, she contracted the disease in November. When the doctor she went to prescribed antibiotics without doing any tests, Lyubov decided to get a second opinion.
“Olia worked as an anesthesiologist at the Zaporizhzhia Regional Infectious Diseases Hospital and lost her life while rescuing her patients from a fire at the hospital in early February. She was only 26 years old, still a child for me, she was totally devoted to her work and she gave me advice over the phone. If it was not for Olia, I have no idea what would have happened to me”.
When the mass vaccination program was being rolled out in Ukraine, educators were among the first to be vaccinated. Remembering how scary it was to be in a confined space face to face with her fears, and how much she wanted to take her granddaughter on vacation, Lyubov immediately checked the box next to her name on the vaccination list. She also brought her husband to get vaccinated.
Later, watching her colleague who had been hesitant for a long time sign up for the vaccination, she thought with pride that she was doing the right thing.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, UNICEF has been debunking myths about COVID-19 and informing Ukrainians how to protect themselves and their loved ones from the disease. Together with the Ministry of Health, the foundation launched and supports the National Communication Center for Vaccination against COVID-19, which provides answers to questions about vaccinations from the public. UNICEF creates and distributes leaflets (half a million copies so far) especially for priority groups, and conducts large-scale nationwide campaigns. It includes the Protected campaign, where one can read about the stories of vaccinated Ukrainians. The campaign has reached 20 million people.
