By Edward Makuzva
The inability to achieve high COVID-19 vaccination rates can continue to have serious harm to our communities, hence the vaccine hesitancy is a major barrier towards high vaccination rates.
Vaccination has globally proved to be an effective prevention pillar which is cost effective too. Prevention is always better than treatment.
An interactive virtual meeting on zoom, organised by the Health Communicators Forum (HCF) of Zimbabwe, facilitated by the Humanitarian Information Facilitation Centre (HIFC) funded by AVAC, health science journalists revisited the complacency in COVID-19 vaccination, which remains a public health matter.
The Community Working Group on Health (CWGH), Executive Chair, Maria Chiwara reiterated that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy remains a public health threat with low education levels a major contributor to vaccine hesitancy and ultimately failure to achieve the target vaccination levels.
Chiwara said there were myths, misinformation and disinformation on social media and traditional and religious beliefs that are anti-vaccines have also added to the problem.
“There were myths and misconception on vaccine side effects and efficacy concerns were top reasons for COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. These fuelled fear and resulted in many people not willing to get vaccinated.
“We evaluated the relationship between COVID-19 vaccine uptake and vaccine hesitancy, and then examined whether community factors were associated with COVID-19 vaccine uptake and hesitancy.
“There was slow uptake of the vaccine when rolled out to people aged 18 years and above with the elderly being the majority of people seen queuing for the jabs.
“Since education levels are not easily modifiable, our results suggest that policymakers would be best served by closing knowledge gaps to overcome negative perceptions of the vaccine through tailored interventions,” Chiwara explained.
Chiwara added people in communities started to be vaccinated later and some took vaccines when they were travelling. We urge our campaigns to change the mindset of the communities with correct messaging. People were used to babies and children being the recipients of vaccination, with a few elderly getting flu shots just before winter in April and May. For adults, vaccination was not common. This factor needed to be explained why suddenly adults had to be vaccinated.
Chiwera said low COVID-19 vaccination was low in less educated communities.
She added that low education levels are a major contributor to vaccine hesitancy and vaccination levels.
“Challenges or barriers which lead to communities having low uptake of vaccines was misinformation or disinformation, meaning that information which was spread to these communities was not clear and people were not clearly informed on COVID-19 vaccines.
“People were informed by social media instead of being informed through authorities that are authentic and believable.
“The were a lot of myths that were circulating that if you get vaccinated you may die from the vaccine or get very sick from the vaccines, so people didn’t want to take up the vaccines.
“Of course the myths and dismisinformation spoke to lack of adequate information through authorities like Ministry of Health and Child Care and the Ministry of Information Media and Broadcasting Services,” Chiwara added.
The CWGH Chair highlighted that they use a valid approach that targeted the individual and we spoke on radio and you heard our director, Itai Rusike addressing issues on COVID-19 very regularly on radio and television .
“We even have our ambassador from Germany taking on about COVID-19 vaccines as a partner who was working with us.
“We actually have one-on-one kind of approach working together with community health workers so that people will understand the importance of the vaccine,” she said.
Chiwara added that they issued statements regularly inorder for us to dymistfy what people were taking about.
She added that as an organisation, they put up large billboards so that people read and understand the messages on the issue of vaccination. We also have roadshows in the communities speaking to the people explaining, engaging and responding to questions being raised during the roadshows. The interactive approach works very well in any campaign.
Statistics show that in Zimbabwe, from 3 January 2020 to 29 March 2023, there have been 264,511 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 5,679 deaths, reported to WHO.
As of 18 March 2023, a total of 13,649,717 vaccine doses have been administered.
Zimbabwe recorded its first death of a media personality, end of March, 2020.
More than 5.55 billion people worldwide have received a dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, equal to about 72.3 percent of the world population.
Vaccination rates around the world have stagnated in recent months, with public demand dropping even as vaccine supply has become more abundant, reports WHO.
Early leads in vaccination rates have become entrenched. Africa has the lowest vaccination rate of any continent, with just 37.2 percent of the population having received at least one dose of a vaccine, compared to 82.3 percent in Latin America.
Africa’s vaccination coverage remains low with most countries sitting on thousands of vaccines which are set to go to waste as the shelf life expires.
No one is safe until everyone is safe.
That can only be achieved through prevention.
Vaccination is a tried and tested prevention pillar.
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