Got your Covid jab? Now convince others to do so

A SHOT OF HOPE

Got your Covid jab? Now convince others to do so

Experts say people refusing to get vaccinated are a risk to those who have taken their shots, and to economic recovery

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

31.07.2021 

How can we stop another Covid wave if people refuse to get vaccinated? America faces this question now as its weekly cases have increased fourfold since June. Most Americans who wanted to get vaccinated are vaccinated, but the rest are proving hard to convince. America is facing a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”.

India could find itself in the same spot a few months down. That’s why Prime Minister Modi spoke about vaccine hesitancy in his Mann ki Baat on June 27. “Trust science, not rumours, and trust our scientists who have worked day and night to develop these vaccines,” he told the nation.

The good news is that vaccine hesitancy is not a very big problem in India. The Economist says it has declined from about 35% in December to just over 20% now. It’s a lot better than the US, where 30% still answer “no” or “don’t know” to the question, “Would you get a Covid-19 vaccine?”

But even 20% hesitancy could be too much with a variant like Delta that hops from one person to six, on average. Last year, with a slower virus, scientists thought vaccinating 60% of the population could get us to herd immunity. Now nobody knows.

“The unvaccinated will set the country on fire over and over again… And they will not be the only ones who are singed,” Apoorva Mandavilli writes in The New York Times. She’s talking about America, but the warning applies everywhere.

The problem with Delta is that it can “break through” the protection vaccines provide. Such breakthrough infections are mostly mild “but some may prompt illness in vaccinated people serious enough to lay them up in bed, miss work – and put their children or older relatives at risk,” Mandavilli says. Some might end up with ‘long Covid’.

So, as long as we have “hardline refuseniks” – as the Economist calls them – getting back to normal will be difficult. And that means businesses will suffer and there will be costs for the economy.

Reasons for vaccine hesitancy

A recent IMF paper says people mostly refuse to take vaccines believing they are unsafe. The second main reason is faith (or lack of it) in the government. Those who “strongly believe the government will provide them with an effective vaccine are almost 50 percentage points more likely to take the vaccine than those who do not.”

But there are other reasons too. For example, do you regard Covid as a dangerous new disease or, like Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, “a little flu”? If people around you – your friends and family – say vaccines are unsafe, their belief will rub off on you. Then, you will start sharing negative information about vaccines yourself.

David Robson, author of ‘The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things,’ writes in a BBC article it’s wrong to assume every vaccine-hesitant person is an anti-vaxxer. “They are simply undecided about their choice to take the injection.”

For example, the hesitation may arise from difficulty in getting an appointment or the distance to a vaccination centre, or the waiting time at the centre. Robson says this might have been the problem in Germany, “which has a very complicated system to identify who is eligible to receive the vaccine at any one time.”

The IMF paper also says, “Having easy access to a vaccination site increases the chances that a person gets the vaccine by 4 to 12 percentage points.”

Don’t insult the hesitant

Dr Deepti Gurdasani, a London-based public health expert and epidemiologist, tells CNN the main thing for overcoming vaccine hesitancy is “to actually understand the reasons and address them rather than dismissing people as either ignorant or selfish.”

Gretchen Chapman, a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon, tells The Washington Post: “Don’t make assumptions about what the barrier is. Listen to them and hear where they are. There could be a reason that surprises you.”

If people are hesitant because they see vaccines as an inconvenience, incentives might work. If they have doubts about a vaccine’s efficacy and safety, you could remind them of the greater risk from Covid. But opposition rooted in ideology or politics can be hard to overcome.

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