Editorial | Get the vaccine message going

A week ago, we told the Government that in-between planning for the logistical roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccine, it had to engage in a robust campaign to convince Jamaicans of the efficacy and safety of the drug. For the epidemiologists and other health professionals preparing for the event are challenged, not only by the understandable fear many people have for a new product, but also an array of conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers with dubious claims about the safety of the vaccine and the motives behind its development.

That advice is worth repeating and must be taken to heart by the administration. A report by this newspaper on Monday made that clear. Even doctors and nurses, as well as non-medical front-line staff at health institutions, are sceptical about taking the vaccine when one becomes available to Jamaicans. That will be some time in the first quarter of next year.

By the end of 2021, the Government hopes to have vaccinated up to 450,000 Jamaicans, or around 16 per cent of the country’s 2.8 million people. The bulk will be front-line workers and vulnerable people, including the elderly and those with underlying health conditions.

While there has been no scientific polling of the vaccine’s likely take-up, The Gleaner’s interviewing of health professionals and other workers at some of the island’s major hospitals indicate that substantial numbers of them will either reject the jab or wait and see before taking it. Indeed, even an administrator of the University Hospital of the West Indies, a teaching hospital linked to The University of the West Indies, declared distrust for the vaccines that have been developed in record time. So, he will not take any, for fear of harmful side effects.

Nurses, porters and general staff across institutions were similarly apprehensive. “Some nurses say they will take it,” said Carmen Brisset, a vice-president of the Nurses Association of Jamaica. “But others say that they aren’t prepared to take it. Some will, some won’t, just like the flu vaccine.”

Although Jamaican children, in order to enter school, have to be vaccinated against a range of childhood diseases, the Government has struggled to have parents consent to their daughters being given the vaccine for cancer of the uterus, while older people do not take available flu shots.

With respect to the COVID-19 vaccine, attitudes in Jamaica appear largely to be mirroring the sentiments of a significant minority of people in developed countries, including the United States, where a vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech is already being administered.

DO NOT WASTE THE TIME

A survey released this week by ABC News and the polling organisation Ipsos showed that up to 80 per cent of Americans were willing to take the vaccine. But only half of this group said they would do so as soon as the drug was available. The other half would wait a bit to gauge its side effects. Fifteen per cent said they would reject it all together.

In other recent polls, done in the days and weeks before the approval of the vaccine, its acceptance hovered in the 60 per cent range. Significantly, in one survey by the Pew Research Institute, only 42 per cent of African Americans said they were willing to take the vaccine, against 61 per cent of White people, 63 per cent of Hispanics, and 83 per cent of Asian Americans. That poll also showed that nearly a third of all respondents were against taking the vaccine, similar to the amount in the United Kingdom who are sceptical. A fifth of Britons declared definitively against taking the vaccine.

A history of undisclosed medical experimentation on African Americans explains, in part, the reticence of Black people to the vaccine. But these concerns have been exacerbated by a raft of anti-vaxxers messages and conspiracy theories about who, and for what supposedly nefarious purpose, the vaccines were developed, which pervade social media.

Those are pervasive, too, in Jamaica. Those negative messages must be confronted if we are to make use of the vaccine when it comes and put the country on a path to sustained recovery. The upside is that Jamaica has a bit of time before the roll-out of the vaccine. That time must not be wasted. The messaging must start now.