Governments and religious leaders of Muslim-majority nations talk to vaccine manufacturers, investigate production processes, and issue guidelines in an effort to ensure that concerns about products banned by Islam do not interfere with inoculations of Covid-19.
On Friday, Indonesia’s high clerical council, with the world’s largest Muslim population, said China’s Sinovac vaccine is allowed by Islam, or halal. The decision came after council representatives visited the Sinovac factory in China last year and conducted a halal audit.
Part of the challenge of deploying vaccines around the world will be to persuade enough people to lead them to achieve herd immunity. In many countries, Muslim and non-Muslim, efforts must overcome security concerns, suspicions, and conspiracy theories, as well as religious and ethical objections.
Gelatin extracted from pigs and cells created from human fetal tissues, which are common in vaccine production, are not halal, according to Muslim scholars.
Acceptance of vaccines before the coronavirus pandemic varied widely among Muslim countries, with great confidence in countries such as Bangladesh and Uzbekistan, according to an opinion poll published in September 2020 in the Lancet medical journal in 149 countries. He found that of the ten countries with the sharpest drop in confidence in vaccines over the 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.