[ad_1]
Anti-Vaxxers protesting in Melbourne, Australia. Photo: Flickr, CC BY-NC
Nine months have passed since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a “public health emergency of international concern.” Since then, more than 44 million cases have been recorded and more than a million lives have been lost. The economic costs are measured in billions of dollars. Global recovery will take years.
A safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine is expected to be developed in record time and approved for production, distribution and acceptance sometime in 2021. Public health experts say that at least 70% of any community should get vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine to achieve an acceptable level of immunity to protect your members.
We recently surveyed 13,426 people in 19 countries. We include two of the most populous and visible nations in Africa, Nigeria and South Africa, which are among the hardest hit by COVID-19 on the continent.
Overall, we found that 71.5% of the participants said they would take a “proven safe and effective vaccine,” while 14% would reject it outright. Another 14% said they would hesitate to get vaccinated.
But that average figure is misleading. It was raised by the favorable responses from two Asian countries that also registered very high confidence in the government’s health recommendations. More than 80% of Chinese respondents and 75% of South Koreans said they would accept a vaccine. South Africans came closer than any other country to the 70% standard, almost 65%. But only 46.3% of Nigerians said they would. This is slightly higher than the results we found in Spain, Sweden, Poland, Brazil and Ecuador.
Hesitation
These vaccine-reluctant people are not necessarily vaccine opponents. A large number of them routinely vaccinate their children against numerous childhood diseases. However, it should be noted that the increasingly well-coordinated global anti-vaccine movement has been repurposed to challenge the very reality of COVID-19, as well as the usefulness of a new vaccine to prevent it. They have taken advantage of social media platforms to promote these doubts.
We also tried to determine how much confidence people would have in a COVID-19 vaccine if their employer recommended it. Just over three in five (61.4%) of all of our respondents said they would. The numbers dropped to less than half for South Africans (46%) and Nigerians (44%).
Our data confirm a worrying trend toward vaccine vacillation that has been found in other global and national studies. Professor Heidi Larson, a co-author of our paper, and her team at the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine recently reported on trends in vaccine confidence observed in 149 countries between 2015 and 2019. They found that instability Politics and religious extremism were critical factors in declining confidence in vaccines in many of these countries.
Recent political unrest in Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa with more than 200 million people, does not bode well for a successful COVID-19 vaccination campaign there. Only South Africa and Ethiopia have recorded more COVID-19 cases on the continent.
Many public health workers also recall a massive boycott against polio vaccination in northern Nigeria. It was caused by a single rumor and not an adverse event. This boycott led to years of more polio infections and deaths in Nigeria, and delayed polio eradication across the continent.
So what needs to be done to move towards a successful African COVID-19 vaccination program?
Going forward
As scientists, we must help healthcare leaders prepare now with education and dialogue to set appropriate expectations for when a coronavirus vaccine may be available. We need to foster vaccine literacy with effective communication and community engagement for acceptance country by country, village by village, taking into account specific community issues, concerns or misconceptions and working with religious and civic leaders and influencers. local.
We also need to help people be more fluent about vaccines – are they safe? Will they protect me and my family? Do I need to be vaccinated to be able to work? Can everyone get it? Will the vaccine sterilize me or my children?
And we must be realistic in the sense that none of this information and promotion will really convince people to accept the COVID-19 vaccine, or any other, in the absence of genuine social trust. Without mutual trust, we may not be able to rebuild economies and return to something that comes close to “normal” life.
It would be tragic if we developed, manufactured and distributed safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines and people refused to take them, when the levels of infrastructure and health equipment cannot stop the pandemic.
Two authors of this study, Drs. Ratzan and Larson are co-leaders of a recently launched global coalition – CONVINCE [COVID-19 New Vaccine Information Communication and Engagement]. This initiative is spearheaded by the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health, the Vaccine Confidence Project of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Wilton Park, a part of the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. United. Several African public health leaders have already joined.
Scott C. Ratzan is a Distinguished Lecturer at the CUNY Graduate Center; Agnes Binagwaho is Vice Chancellor of the University for Equity in Global Health; Heidi Larson is Senior Lecturer in Epidemiology and Population Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; Jeffrey V Lazarus is associate research professor at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal); Kenneth Rabin is a Senior Scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Lawrence O. Gostin is a University Professor at the founder Linda D. & Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Global Health Law at Georgetown University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
