Tens of thousands vaccinated in mass immunisation campaign in Samoa

Tens of thousands of people in Samoa received the MMR vaccine in a mass immunisation campaign which took place over two days.

TVNZ News reports it took 102 teams across the whole country to undertake the enormous task of reaching as many unvaccinated people as possible in two days.

The Samoan government says nearly 33,000 vaccinations were administered over the two day campaign with over 20,000 of them carried out on Thursday and over 12,000 yesterday.

Before the mass vaccination campaign just over 52,000 Samoans were immunised.

Following the campaign 178,661 out of a population of 200,879 are now vaccinated bringing the immunisation rate to 89 per cent.

To carry out this mass operation the government shut down the country for two day from 7am to 5pm to enable medical teams to go door-to-door.

Families put out red flags to indicate to teams that members of their household were not vaccinated.