Canadians divided over vaccines
As virus keeps spreading, new poll suggests number of people opposed to mandatory shots is growing
OTTAWA — Canadians appear to be turning against mandatory COVID-19 inoculations wheneever a vaccine becomes avail- able, with a new poll suggesting tthe number of people opposed to the idea is growing.
The poll by Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies is the latest to take the public’s temperature during the COVID-19 pandemic, and comes as governments and scientists around the world are scrambling to find a vaccine.
The federal government has also inked a number of agreements with pharmaceutical companies to purchase millions of doses of their vaccine candidates if they prove safe and effective, over fears of a global rush for the drugs.
While the majority of respondents in earlier polls had said they were in favour of the government’s requiring people get inoculated once a vaccine is discovered, the new poll found that was no longer the case.
Only 39 per cent of respondents said getting a vaccine should be mandatory, a decline of 18 percentage points from a similar poll conducted in July aand more than 20 points lower than t in May.
Fifty-four per cent of respondents instead said a vaccine should be voluntary, an 11 percentage-point increase from JJuly and 15 since May. Six per cent of respondents said they did not know.
The online poll was conducted Oct. 9 to 11 and surveyed 1,539 adult Canadians. It cannot be assigned a margin of error because internet polls are not considered random samples.
Leger executive vice-president Christian Bourque was puzzled by the change, particularly since the percentage of respondents who said they
wwould get a free vaccine as soon as it becomes available remains relatively high.
Sixty-three per cent said they wwould take up such an offer, seven points lower than in July. Another 17 per cent said they wwould not, which was up three points, while 20 per cent did not know.
“So some people who said they would get it would not make it mandatory,” Bourque said. “In other words, it should be like any other flu vaccine, which is voluntary.”
A Statistics Canada survey in
AAugust found some Canadians are worried about the safety and possible side effects of a COVID-19 vaccine.
“A lot of the media attention has been around whether it will be reliable, is it coming out too early?” Bourque said. “But if they were worried it’s not safe and should not be made mandatory, why do two out of three Canadians say they’ll get it?”
The federal government and public-health officials have insisted that they will not cut corners when it comes to safety requirements.