‘We showed strength and resilience’: The first mosques to offer Covid vaccines
In early 2021, UK mosques began setting themselves up as vaccine centres for the first time, helping fight disinformation in their communities
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On 8 December 2020, a moment of hope emerged at a bleak time. Nearly a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, the first person in the UK to be vaccinated against the virus walked out of a hospital in Coventry.
In nearby Birmingham, workers at a local pharmacy were concerned that the roll-out of the vaccine might miss some of the most vulnerable people in their community. They had seen the rapid spread of disinformation about vaccines targeting Pakistani and Bengali communities. It was already clear that people from ethnic minorities were being disproportionately killed by the virus, but now they were being deterred from the only available means to protect themselves.
The pharmacists contacted the trustees of the Al-Abbas Islamic Centre, a mosque in Balsall Heath where they had already been working to counter the fake news circulating on WhatsApp groups and social media. The pharmacists suggested the mosque could become a vaccination site, a move that would clearly show the local Muslim community that getting vaccinated was safe and religiously permissible.
The trustees agreed. At the end of January 2021, the Al-Abbas Islamic Centre became the first mosque in the UK to act as a vaccine centre. That historic moment sent a powerful message not just to people within the community who had doubts about vaccination, but also against a rising tide of Islamophobia that included the blaming of Muslims for spreading the virus.
The initial goal was to vaccinate 300-500 people per week, focusing on care home residents, healthcare workers, the very elderly and the extremely clinically vulnerable. In practice, closer to 1,000-2,000 people a week came to the mosque for their vaccine, according to an NHS report.
The Al-Abbas Islamic Centre was one of many mosques that joined the fight against Covid-19.
Dr Omar Taha was working as a GP and was a trustee of the Al-Emaan Centre, a mosque in Bromley. At the start of the pandemic, volunteers distributed hand sanitiser and offered help and assistance to their neighbours. Meanwhile, the mosque’s programme of events went online for the first time in its history.
“It helped us to forge a relationship and camaraderie with one another as a Muslim community,” Taha says. “Those relationships are lasting to this day.”
As soon as a vaccine became available, Taha knew that the mosque needed to be involved. “There are a fair few medics that attend the mosque, and I just recall having conversations [about the vaccine] with some of the leads of the local NHS organisations,” he says.
Taha linked with other GPs across Bromley and the pieces fell into place. The NHS would supply the vaccines and the Al-Emaan Centre would provide volunteers and a venue in the community. “The mosque was in lockdown, so there were no prayers or anything like that. We essentially turned the whole prayer space into a clinic,” Taha says.
Yunus Dudhwala, a chaplain at Barts Health NHS Trust, worked with communities such as Taha’s, supporting mosques to encourage their congregations to get vaccinated.
“Many people were concerned about how quickly the vaccines were developed and there were widespread rumors and misconceptions in the community,” Dudhwala says. That was concerning, he adds, as he had “witnessed first-hand the devastating impact of Covid-19 and people dying on the wards, including some who I knew personally”.
“I wanted to make sure myself before I put any message out, so I consulted experts within the hospital trust and sought advice from trusted external experts — people I knew personally and whose guidance was based on science,” Dudhwala says.
Hearing that vaccines were safe and potentially life-saving from someone they knew and trusted — such as Taha and Dudhwala — encouraged many people to get vaccinated.
The Al-Emaan clinic ran every Saturday for six months and again during the following winter booster campaign. Many of the people coming in for their vaccine were not Muslim and had never been inside a mosque before, Taha says, describing it as a “great opportunity” to build cohesion within the wider community.
The Al-Emaan Centre and local NHS workers also set up a specialist clinic for people with a severe mental illness or conditions such as dementia or Parkinson’s, who were at high risk of missing out on treatment. Feedback was positive across the community and the then prime minister Boris Johnson paid a visit to the mosque to highlight the work it was doing.
Taha still acts as a trustee at the mosque. He is proud of the steps taken to protect the community, but the scars of the pandemic still remain. “It was a really challenging time,” he says, adding that the mental health impact is still felt to this day. The mosque continues to address those effects through Islamic counselling sessions, coffee mornings and a sewing club they launched post-pandemic. “Covid taught us that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. It taught us the importance of social ties and human interconnectivity.”
Dudhwala believes there are lessons to be learned for how mosques can help encourage better health in Muslim communities.
“Health promotion will never be their primary objective and we have to acknowledge that,” he says. “The key is to engage with mosque leadership respectfully and collaboratively, providing accurate information and working through trusted figures within the community.”
Taha reflects that mosques like his can be held up as examples in future. “We showed strength and resilience in a global crisis. And that memory will always live on.”
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