More than 800 people and an undisclosed number of clients from several companies based in the Kampala Metropolitan Area received fake Covid-19 jabs last month.

Some of the recipients have since died in the second wave of the pandemic, the Ugandan government revealed.

Dr Wallen Naamara, the head of State House Health Monitoring Unit, told Daily Monitor that people who took the fake Covid-19 jabs shouldn’t get worried because there is a possibility that the fraudsters could have injected them with water that was put in stolen bottles.

Dr Naamara told a press conference in Kampala that the suspects, including a doctor who is currently on the run, duped several people and companies and injected them with fake vaccines between May 15 and June 17.

State House detectives on Wednesday arrested two nurses from Nakawa, Kampala, on accusations of vaccinating people using a suspected fake vaccine.

“The contents of labels of this vaccine are suspected to have either been stolen from somewhere or manufactured from Nasser Road in Kampala but they did not pass the right channels of the government. Almost all the vaccines of Covid-19 are 5mls, but this one doesn’t look like 5mls, it’s actually more. The top of the vial is so tampered with and it looks like a fake vaccine,” Dr Naamara said.