On Kashmir’s dangerous border, frontline healthworkers fight Covid vaccination battles

If medical teams carrying Covid-19 vaccines were ever to make it to her village high in the Himalayas in Indian-administered Kashmir, Safeera Begum had a plan. She would hide. The 35-year-old was expecting her seventh child when India’s vaccination campaign began early last year. Misinformation and conspiracy theories echoing around the jab had made her fearful. “I never wanted to get vaccinated,” says Begum, who – with no mobile connectivity or internet in her village of Dudran - was cut off from reliable sources of information during the pandemic. “All I had heard was that the vaccine is unsafe for young women and unmarried men,” she says, although there is no evidence linking infertility to the Covid-19 vaccine.