Improve vaccine messaging

The calls for a full opening of the country are becoming even louder. The Government is now tasked with coming up with plans to combat the fourth wave and avoid the wasting of another batch of COVID vaccines. The messaging to the majority of the population needs to improve, so that there can be greater take-up.

Staving off the fourth wave

4 Nov 2021

THE GOVERNMENT was bound to ease restrictions on daily life, or risk not only stymieing the nascent recovery, but pushing the economy back into a deep and prolonged recession. Now, the Holness administration must outline its next steps to forestall Jamaica’s lurch into a fourth wave of the COVID-19 crisis, and another waste of hundreds of thousands of doses of vaccines against the coronavirus.

However, the administration must understand, as the epidemiologist Professor Peter Figueroa put it, that “just making announcements over the radio and running ads on TV”will not be good enough. It is past time for a logically structured and clearly articulated programme, around which Jamaicans can coalesce to confront the scourge of this disease.

In other words, the situation calls for new, and higher, levels of creativity and leadership from Prime Minister Andrew Holness and his administration.

Jamaica accounts for around 0.026 per cent and 0.044 per cent, respectively, of the people who have contracted or died from COVID-19 since the advent of the disease in late 2019. That translates to more than 89,000 people being diagnosed with the virus and nearly 2,250 dying. In a small country, with close, tight-knit communities, that is a significant number of people.

Those numbers, however, could have been significantly higher but for several weeks of partial lockdowns and limited movement imposed by the Government over the summer, to slow the virus’third wave, during which scores of people died and the positivity rates from COVID-19 reached well over 30 per cent. The island’s hospitals bulged at the seams and the health system was in danger of collapse.

LACKS FISCAL WHEREWITHAL

With only 13 per cent of Jamaicans fully vaccinated, and around a fifth partially so, the measures that slowed the virus’ summer rampage were, over the long run, unsustainable. Large numbers of Jamaicans work informal jobs, from which earnings require their daily hustle. Many people live, as it were, from hand to mouth. Unlike rich countries, Jamaica’s Government lacks the fiscal wherewithal to provide a substantial safety net for its at-risk population.

The reopening of the economy was therefore inevitable. However, this newspaper is unconvinced that the Government has been sufficiently robust in its efforts, beyond the sporadic lockdowns, in mobilising public support against COVID-19. For instance, its determination has been less than firm in enforcing the wearing of masks – an effective method in preventing the spread of virus – in crowded public spaces and on public transportation, and forthrightly telling people why the action is necessary. Prime Minister Andrew Holness need only tour the business and market districts of downtown Kingston for evidence of the failure of the mask mandate.

The Government has not done a good job in encouraging Jamaicans to be inoculated against the virus. Jamaica’s vaccination effort, like those of many countries, has been faced with resistance of hardcore anti-vaxxers, vaccines sceptics, and people who harbour doubts about these specific drugs because of the speed with which they were developed. However, the health and wellness minister, Dr Christopher Tufton, consistently argues that about a third of the population is readily open to taking the vaccines. Perhaps the same amount is open to being convinced to take the jab. Yet, after nine months of vaccine availability, only 20 per cent of adults are fully vaccinated, 10 per cent shy of the figure of Dr Tufton’s willing population. Moreover, over the past six weeks, the Government has faced the embarrassment of discarding 245,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine because they became stale-dated. Of these, 165,000 doses expired on October 30.

VACCINE PREFERENCE

Part of the problem, health officials say, is that many Jamaicans go vaccine shopping, with a preference for the Pfizer brand of the product. That could be problematic, given that Jamaica has just received a gift of 369,000 of the AstraZeneca product from Canada and is soon expecting a shipment of another 204,000 doses, bought with Jamaica’s own money. That is enough vaccines to fully inoculate over 286,000 people.

While the issue of brand preference is a matter to be overcome, non-government experts also blame ineffectual government strategies and poor communication for the weak performance in inoculations. For example, a task force appointed by the Government to provide suggestions for accelerating vaccinations noted that half of the island’s nurses were unvaccinated. Yet, nurses and other health workers would normally be trusted voices in transmitting health-related information to communities.

One worry for some nurses of childbearing age, according to the task force’s chair, Professor Gordon Shirley, is for their reproductive health. In such situations the response, he argued, would be to have trusted gynaecologists speak, in understandable language, “what are the issues and the risks associated”. That’s the flip side of Professor Figueroa’s call for community-based mobilisation efforts.

Additionally, while signalling an intention to eventually introduce vaccination mandates, the Government, as is the case with others of its COVID19 initiatives, is tiptoeing towards the goal, preferring to have the private sector take the lead. The upshot is a lack of policy clarity and purposeful action and uncertainty, which provides an opportunity for falseflagging by the anti-vaxxers and vaccine sceptics. The result is the further erosion of the confidence of those who may just have required a push out of their vaccine hesitancy.

Early on, the administration established March 2022 as its deadline for vaccinating 65 per cent of Jamaica’s population, the amount that it said was required for herd immunity. That date no longer seems feasible, unless the Government can fix its problems and get a clear strategy in place, and move with purpose on the project.

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