Governments and religious leaders in Muslim-majority countries talk to vaccine manufacturers, investigate production processes and issue guidelines to ensure that concerns about products banned by Islam do not interfere with Covid-19 vaccinations.
On Friday, Indonesia’s top clerical council, with the largest Muslim population in the world, said China’s Sinovac vaccine is allowed by Islam, or halal. The decision came after council representatives visited China’s Sinovac plant last year and conducted a halal audit.
Part of the challenge of launching vaccines worldwide will be to get enough people to reach the herd’s immunity. In many countries, Muslim and non-Muslim, efforts must go beyond security concerns, suspicions and conspiracy theories, as well as religious and ethical objections.
Gelatin taken from pigs and cells created with the help of tissues from human fetuses, which are both common in the production of vaccines, are not halal, say Muslim scholars.
Acceptance of vaccinations before the coronavirus pandemic has varied widely among Muslim countries, with high confidence in countries such as Bangladesh and Uzbekistan, according to a 149-country opinion poll published in September 2020 in the medical journal Lancet. It found that of the 10 countries with the sharpest decline in vaccine confidence in the last four years to 2019, seven were predominantly Muslim: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria and Pakistan. The other three were Japan, Georgia and Serbia.