Education essential to halt vaccine hesitancy
There is even a fancy phrase for it — vaccine hesitancy.
Simply put, it means a reluctance to be vaccinated even when vaccines are available to you.
How serious is this problem in SA? In an Ipsos poll in September last year, only 64% of citizens indicated they would take the vaccine when it is available.
However, in the more recent Edelman Trust Barometer 2021, a mere 49% said they would be willing to vaccinate, of which 27% said they would only take the vaccine after six months to a year.
That is second lowest after Russia in a survey of 28 countries, with the other two Brics nations the top performers when it comes to willingness to take the lifesaving jab — Brazil at 76% and India at 80%.
This kind of data spells danger for if so large a number of South Africans are hesitant to take the vaccine, our chances of quickly reaching herd immunity will needlessly extend our nightmare of illness and death well beyond 2022. Red lights, people.
We should settle for the fact that there is a percentage of people in any population who will not take any vaccine, even if their own lives were at stake.
This includes religious nuts who believe the jab will “infuse 666” into your blood, thereby giving you the mark of the beast, besides all other kinds of conspiracy theorists.
Not much can be done to reattach these fertile minds to reality, especially if your authoritative voice is Michael the archangel and not Dr Zweli Mkhize the health minister.
Most of the more hesitant South Africans are simply uninformed or ill-informed, which is why I asked one of our country’s foremost medical scientists: what role can education, or the lack thereof, play in dealing with vaccine hesitancy? Education, it turns out, is the key.
The problem is the bungled communication from government from almost the start of the pandemic.
Our leaders were more concerned about enforcing lockdown than using the platform for educating the population.
The heavy-handed measures to clamp down on beachgoers or township strollers was painful to watch. Compliance now, education later, or not at all, seemed to be the attitude.
In a country where literacy levels are low, the education received via expert pronouncements had a decidedly middleclass subject in mind. Few of our epidemiologists seem to have taken one of those courses in the public communication of science.
When I listened to our experts, I could not help thinking of Dr Anthony Fauci, the American face of Covid education, when he shared this memorable quip: “If you cannot explain it simply, you probably do not understand it well enough yourself.”
All social partners — government, companies, media houses, non-governmental organisations — need to create a co-ordinated campaign to educate the public about vaccines in ways that everyone can understand.
I don ’ t yet see serial ads on television or repeated blocks of information covering whole pages of our more popular print media or the information leaflet handed out at taxi ranks and train stations. Nothing.
Small wonder we are vaccine hesitant.
It starts with giving people basic information about vaccines; we sometimes underestimate how much our lexicon has changed since the start of the pandemic.
There’s a lot to take in. What is a vaccine? How does it work? Why it can save your life?
It is also important to be honest in communication about the limitations of vaccines as no vaccine is 100% effective and there might well be minor side effects.
To build trust in medicine, tell people what to expect and what they can do about possible after-effects.
Remind people about how vaccines have virtually eliminated, or at least controlled, what once was among the most frightening of dread diseases — polio, diphtheria, mumps, measles, chickenpox, rotavirus, whooping cough, and rubella.
Demonstrate safety by recruiting trusted people or known personalities to take the vaccine in public.
One of the most important interventions is to completely revise the school curriculum from Grades 1 to 12 to lay a foundation for understanding pathogens, from the history of pandemics to the global spread of viruses to the measures that can be taken to mitigate harm, including, but not only, vaccines.
Why? Because every infectious disease expert has warned that the next pandemic is around the corner and that the coronavirus will be with us, in some form, for a very long time.
Here’s the unpleasant truth — in the absence of evidencebased knowledge on vaccines made available to ordinary people, there are any number of whackos in the wings ready and willing to fill that gap with lies, misinformation and conspiracies of all kinds.
To put it bluntly, our chances of getting more jabs into arms depends first on getting more facts into heads.