We show some of the reasons for Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy in Uganda, particularly in the context of political responses to the disease. We suggest that global health partners’ and politicians’ involvement in disease containment measures, including enforcing lockdown and forcibly hospitalising asymptomatic clients, has had major repercussions for vaccine uptake. Over 21 months of ethnographic study and interviews conducted in Kasese, Wakiso, Entebbe and Gulu, we found that when the state exerted excessive powers, many local people, already experienced with virulent disease epidemics such as Ebola and cholera, remained sceptical of and resistant to Covid-19 interventions including vaccination. This prompted health policy makers and vaccine donors to move to a campaign mode of rolling out Covid-19 Vaccines as opposed to the static mode whereby vaccines are delivered to hospitals and clients access them through routine immunisation schedules. Despite this, frontline health workers, villagers and other beneficiaries remained vaccine hesitant, asserting that they ‘want cassava and not Covid-19 vaccines’. In our analysis, we foreground how the perceived risk and severity of the disease, mistrust in medical technologies and questioning of national political agendas underpinned their responses.
