The Tribune

By Malcolm Strachan

THE arrival of more vaccines and more assurances will bolster our supply before the year’s end is certainly good news. However, with a void the size of the Grand Canyon in the government’s communication and vaccine education machinery, vaccination hesitancy may still prevail. If it does, you can bet the people of The Bahamas will lose handily.

“Due to the volume of obituaries this week, a continuation of the obituaries are found on pages 13, 14, 15 and 16 in the main section of the paper.”

That’s what the Obituaries section of The Tribune read last week.

As that penetrates your psyche – for the individuals who prefer to not take the vaccine – one has to wonder if any of those departed souls were your family members. Certainly, while we respect the right to choose whether or not to take the vaccine, the part of the conversation rarely ever mentioned is the people who suffered as they exited this world. Some at the end of a full life, others snatched away in their prime, the story remains the same – they were taken too soon. We are battling an equal opportunity killer in COVID-19.

Anyone can be next. Thus, the importance of following public health measures and, even more so, getting vaccinated, remain our best weapons as we continue to duel this invisible force.

As vaccination acceptance and hesitancy continue to fracture our society, much like our constructs that we allow to divide us, we rarely get curious about what is causing such deep division.

Is it religious belief? Could it be political affiliation? Is it the mass hysteria and conflicting narratives surrounding COVID-19 that we’re fed up with?

Whatever it is, it must begin with a question.

We seriously need to investigate what the barriers are from us making our country a safer place for citizens and residents, as well as a destination visitors can come to and return home in one piece.

A study published in the Nature Medicine journal last month sought to ask similar questions looking at global vaccination hesitancy in hopes to discover why in the face of illness, death and economic calamity, people continue to refuse the strongest weapon we have in our arsenal.

The researchers noted vaccine hesitancy, defined by the paper’s authors as “the reluctance of people to receive safe and recommended available vaccines”, was already a growing phenomenon around the world prior to the current global health crisis. Such vaccination hesitancy has led to resurgence in diseases such as measles which reached its highest number of cases in 23 years in 2019.

Five elements were determined to be the drivers of vaccine hesitancy.

These were noted as: “confidence, complacency, convenience (or constraints), risk calculation and collective responsibility.

Dissecting these drivers a bit further, we can ascertain that confidence would have spoken to the vaccine’s ability to protect from the spread of COVID-19; complacency highlights the ‘wait-and-see’ attitude that many people have adopted; convenience and constraints consider the accessibility or lack thereof with respect to vaccines; risk calculation looks at the side effects and possibly the chance that one may still contract COVID-19; and finally, collective responsibility, which factors in how all stakeholders are affected.”

This study revealed lower-middle-income countries had higher acceptance rates than higher income countries such as Russia and the US.

The data showed vaccine acceptance was hinged to an interest in personal protection against the virus. Conversely, hesitancy was caused by concerns of the side effects.

Beyond the common side effects of fatigue, fever, chills and soreness at the site of the injection, which AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson all share, a tiny fraction of the total vaccinated population have experienced more serious side effects.

That is not meant to minimise the affects on an individual, but Bahamians have been taking other immunisations that also have mild to severe side affects and do so without a question.

It begs the question of who we view as the authority that should give us guidance on these matters. Can we hear from those people in a targeted, organised fashion?

Uninformed

The COVID team’s health updates, soundbites from the Prime Minister, Minister of Health, the COVID Consultative Committee and the occasional commercial on the radio are simply not doing the job. Far too many Bahamians are grossly uninformed on this topic. Furthermore, between the offerings from the above mentioned parties and the absurdities bandied about by armchair scientists, the Bahamian people are only getting what amounts to noise, which does not help the hysteria.

The government needs to commission its own research on the vaccines being brought into the country and have town halls on each island and talk to the people in the community directly about their concerns.

Allow the people that have been performing the research since the beginning of vaccine production to provide Bahamians with evidence-based facts. Bring along individuals who have recovered from COVID-19 and allow them to share their stories about what they went through.

Government of The Bahamas, you have to ratchet up your communication with the populace. The average Bahamian is unmoved by seeing government officials and other prominent figures within the community take the jab publicly.

Maybe early on, it was effective to show the populace your confidence.

However, for the thousands that remain unvaccinated, it is safe to say that it’s time to move on to Plan B.

Every family – every Bahamian – needs to become more informed and have their concerns relative to the COVID-19 vaccines alleviated. Otherwise, we are just waiting for more people to die and fear to become the ultimate motivation.

That is hardly a price I want to pay.