The Tunisian authorities’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly their management of the country’s vaccine rollout program, has exposed the entrenched inequality in the country’s healthcare system, Amnesty International said today.

With the World Health Organization (WHO) warning that new Covid variants may unleash another wave of infections, only 54% of Tunisia’s population have received two doses and only 10% a third. Of those third doses, those living in urban areas received up to 60%, while in many rural regions, vaccination rates for the third shot were as low as 4,5%.

In a new briefing, Covid-19 vaccines and access to health in rural Tunisia, the organization sets out the significant disparities in vaccination coverage between urban areas along the coast and rural regions of the country. To identify the structural barriers that prevent people in marginalized regions from gaining fair access to vaccines, Amnesty International conducted field research in Ghardimaou, a deprived region located in a mountainous area beside the Tunisian-Algerian border.

“Today, on the first day of World Immunization Week, we remind the Tunisian authorities of the importance of granting equal access to vaccines and prioritizing the most marginalized. It’s unacceptable in today’s Tunisia that during a pandemic, the rural regions are yet again forgotten and receive less than half the vaccines that urban regions have,” said Amna Guellali, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa.

“Tunisian health officials must ensure that everyone can enjoy their right to health without consideration of their location or socio-economic status. They must urgently address these flagrant disparities and prioritize strategies to improve health infrastructures in rural areas, especially given that new Covid variants might lead to a new wave of infections and further loss of life.”

Since December 2020, Tunisia has officially recorded at least a million cases of Covid-19, along with 28,509 deaths. According to the Health Ministry, although more than 6.3 million individuals have received two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine, only 1.18 million have received a third booster dose.