‘One thing people often overlook is the adaptive immune response caused by vaccination is natural. Vaccination prepares the body’s immune system in the same way “natural” exposure to infection does. It just does it in a safer, controlled way with a much lower dose.
‘Given there’s no underlying reason why natural health and vaccination cannot coexist, why does this perception exist, and why does it persist?’
Read here (The Conversation, Oct 19, 2021)
Ramping up communications to convince those on the fence, along with differentiated measures nudging more to take the shot can help get vaccination rates up, say infectious diseases experts on CNA’s Heart of the Matter podcast...
‘As someone who treats COVID-19 patients, Dr David Lye, Director of the Infectious Disease Research and Training Office at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID), says he has spoken to “thousands of people”, and he always has one message for them: Get vaccinated. As a researcher and a scientist, he admits he gets frustrated when he encounters people medically able to get a vaccine but choose not to. But would he go so far as to recommend that vaccines be made compulsory?
“To be honest, I am in favour of a vaccine mandate, but I'm also aware that the impact on individuals in these times can be devastating,” Dr Lye added, pointing to the possibility of the unvaccinated getting shut out of jobs if COVID-19 vaccination was made compulsory nationally.
‘He was speaking to Supervising Editor Lin Suling, host of Heart of the Matter podcast on Thursday (Sep 16).
‘Dr Ashley St John, Associate Professor at Duke-NUS Medical School’s Programme in Emerging Infectious Diseases, who was also on the podcast, agreed. "If you're asking me personally, it would be nice to have compulsory COVID-19 vaccines, but I also understand there are other policy considerations … beyond just the scientific aspects.”
Read here (Channel News Asia, Sept 18, 2021)
“Compassion fatigue is the feeling, ‘It’s hard to care when you’re overloaded but still dedicated to the task,’” Dr Kernan Manion, executive director of the Center for Physician Rights, said. “Moral injury occurs when the nurse or doctor feels that, ‘The patients I’ve dedicated my life to treating are now here because of their own negligence and now they’re imposing upon me and my team to treat them, while also exposing us to continued danger from this virus.’”
These days, Meck knows that first-hand. She is seeing more children with Covid-19 at her Missouri hospital than ever before. At 46%, Missouri has one of the lowest rates of full vaccination in the country. “I don’t even get the chance to try to show you all the split-second decisions and critical thinking and compassion I’m capable of,” Meck said. “Practising mindfulness is not going to fix moral injury.”
Read here (The Guardian, Sept 18, 2021)
‘In the absence of a mandatory vaccine policy, the government can consider other lesser restrictive options. They are as follows:
‘In a nutshell, the government should navigate through this ethical dilemma cautiously. The government should consider other less restrictive alternatives that will protect the individual’s self-determination which is also in the state’s interest.’
Read here (Free Malaysia Today, Sept 12, 2021)
Pregnant women who received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine were not at higher risk for miscarriage than their unvaccinated counterparts, according to a trio of new US studies:
Miscarriage no more likely in vaccinated: In the first study, published yesterday in JAMA, researchers from the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) surveillance network used diagnostic and procedure codes and electronic health records to identify and assign gestational ages of miscarriages and ongoing pregnancies from Dec 15, 2020, to Jun 28, 2021... Read here.
More evidence of vaccine safety in pregnancy: Similarly, in a letter yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), CDC scientists enrolled 2,456 women who were part of the agency's COVID-19 vaccine safety pregnancy registry... Read here.
A revised risk estimate: And in response to a letter yesterday in NEJM, a separate group of CDC researchers updated its analysis of 2,456 pregnant women who received one or two doses of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine before conception or 20 weeks' gestation... Read here.
Read here (Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, Sept 9, 2021)
“Vaccine hesitancy has less to do with misunderstanding the science and more to do with general mistrust of scientific institutions and government,” says Maya Goldenberg, a philosophy expert at the University of Guelph, Ontario, who studies the phenomenon. Historically, people harmed or oppressed by such institutions are the ones most likely to resist vaccines, adds Agnes Arnold-Forster, a medical historian at the University of Bristol in England.
‘A range of recurring and intersecting themes have fueled hesitancy globally and historically. These include anxiety about unnatural substances in the body, vaccines as government surveillance or weapons, and personal liberty violations. Other concerns relate to parental autonomy, faith-based objections, and worries about infertility, disability or disease. For example, some people oppose vaccines that were grown in cell culture lines that began from aborted fetal cells, or they mistakenly believe vaccines contain fetal cells. One of today’s false beliefs — that COVID-19 vaccines contain a microchip — represents anxiety about both vaccine ingredients and vaccines as a surveillance tool.’
Read here (Science News, May 11, 2021)
‘So what will change their minds? I cannot imagine that any amount of hectoring or shaming, or proclamations from the public-health or Democratic communities, will make much of a difference for this group. “I’ve lost all faith in the media and public-health officials,” Myles Pindus, a 24-year-old in Brooklyn, said. “It might sound crazy, but I’d rather go to Twitter and check out a few people I trust than take guidance from the CDC, or WHO, or Fauci,” Baca, the Colorado truck driver, told me. Other no-vaxxers offered similar appraisals of various Democrats and liberals, but they were typically less printable.
‘From my conversations, I see three ways to persuade no-vaxxers: make it more convenient to get a shot; make it less convenient to not get a shot; or encourage them to think more socially.’
Read here (The Atlantic, May 3, 2021)
‘Based on what we know so far, the future of the J&J vaccine can fork in at least three different directions. In one, the vaccine flames out; unless many, many more cases come to light soon, this seems unlikely. Either of the other two—in which officials end the pause and return the nation to its regularly scheduled vaccine programming, with or without restrictions on who gets J&J next—are more likely. No matter the outcome, though, today’s announcement won’t quickly be forgotten. Pauses in clinical trials, sprinkled through the past year, have already stoked vaccine hesitancy, skepticism, and outright denialism in many circles. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, previously stigmatized for being “less effective,” now risks a second label: “less safe.” It’s on the precipice of becoming our country’s grody vaccine; maybe it’s already toppled over the edge. An altered reputation in the U.S. will reverberate throughout the world, and set back the global struggle to contain the coronavirus.
‘If the J&J vaccine does return with the FDA’s blessing, we’ll need to rehabilitate it with clear and nuanced messaging, Gounder and many others told me. A vaccine can be excellent. A vaccine can also carry risks. Both can be true; both have been true, for other shots we’ve used. In this case, the gamble could be very small—and still be well worth it.’
Read here (The Atlantic, Apr 13, 2021)
‘Vaccines are a key part of the solution to ending the COVID-19 pandemic and, since the early stages of the crisis, the World Health Organization (WHO) has argued that there needs to be a coordinated approach towards ensuring that everyone, not just people living in rich countries, receives adequate protection from the virus, as it spread rapidly across the world.
‘Out of this concern grew the Global COVAX Facility, the only global initiative that is working with governments and manufacturers to ensure COVID-19 vaccines are available worldwide to both higher and lower income countries.
‘Here are five things to know about the challenges facing COVAX, and how they can be overcome...
Read here (UN News, Apr 5, 2021)
‘In this crowded field of wrongness, one voice stands out. The voice of Alex Berenson: the former New York Times reporter, Yale-educated novelist, avid tweeter, online essayist, and all-around pandemic gadfly. Berenson has been serving up COVID-19 hot takes for the past year, blithely predicting that the United States would not reach 500,000 deaths (we’ve surpassed 550,000) and arguing that cloth and surgical masks can’t protect against the coronavirus (yes, they can).
‘Berenson has a big megaphone. He has more than 200,000 followers on Twitter and millions of viewers for his frequent appearances on Fox News’ most-watched shows. On Laura Ingraham’s show, he downplayed the vaccines, suggesting that Israel’s experience proved they were considerably less effective than initially claimed. On Tucker Carlson Tonight, he predicted that the vaccines would cause an uptick in cases of COVID-related illness and death in the U.S...’
Read here (The Atlantic, Apr 1, 2021)
‘China's vaccine diplomacy campaign has been a surprising success: It has pledged roughly half a billion doses of its vaccines to more than 45 countries, according to a country-by-country tally by The Associated Press. With just four of China's many vaccine makers claiming they are able to produce at least 2.6 billion doses this year, a large part of the world's population will end up inoculated not with the fancy Western vaccines boasting headline-grabbing efficacy rates, but with China's humble, traditionally made shots.
‘Amid a dearth of public data on China's vaccines, hesitations over their efficacy and safety are still pervasive in the countries depending on them, along with concerns about what China might want in return for deliveries. Nonetheless, inoculations with Chinese vaccines already have begun in more than 25 countries, and the Chinese shots have been delivered to another 11, according to the AP tally, based on independent reporting in those countries along with government and company announcements.’
Read here (CP24, Mar 2, 2021)
Read here (Scientific American, March 2021)
‘From the first case diagnosed a year ago at a hospital in northern Italy to the empty shops, restaurants and stadiums of Europe's cities, the lives of Europeans have been changed forever. Curbs on movement have forced every country and society to adapt its rules and rethink its culture. There have been hard truths and unexpected innovations in a year that changed Europe.
Read here (BBC, Feb 20, 2021)
Read here (Axios, Feb 20, 2021)
‘The lack of informed messaging from the Trump administration, combined with the range of different COVID vaccines, the emergence of new coronavirus variants, and inconsistent state and municipal rollout plans, have caused confusion and driven vaccine hesitancy. Scientific American asked Namandjé Bumpus, a pharmacologist at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, and Ashley Lauren St. John, an immunologist at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore to answer some of the biggest questions about the currently available COVID vaccines:
Read here (Scientific American, Feb 19, 2021)
‘Prime Minister Benjamin Nethanyahu, who's made the vaccination campaign a major election issue, warned that more than half a million Israelis over the age of 50 have still not gone to get their jab. "I remind you of the most dramatic piece of data," he said this week. "97% of deaths and 93% of severe cases are in this group." Since the start of the pandemic over 5,400 people have died of COVID-19.
‘Overall, four million Israelis have been vaccinated so far, and about 2,6 million of them have received both shots. Since February, everybody aged over 16 has been called upon to get their shot. "We are trying to see what are the attitudes of people towards the vaccine. There is a tremendous amount of fake news in the public," says Dr. Boaz Lev, head of the vaccine task force at the Ministry of Health in Jerusalem. "This is worrisome, but it will take a while to know what the compliance is."
Read here (DW, Feb 17, 2020)
‘Attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines seem to be improving in some parts of the world, a survey of thousands of people in 15 countries has found. Researchers have welcomed the results, which suggest that an increasing proportion of people are willing to be immunized. But they caution that some problems persist, such as concerns about vaccine safety. “For the first time since the pandemic began, I can sense that optimism is spreading faster than the virus,” says behavioural scientist Sarah Jones at Imperial College London, who co-led the global attitudes towards a COVID-19 vaccine survey.
‘The survey is part of the COVID-19 behaviour tracker, run by Imperial together with the UK market-research company YouGov.’
Read here (Nature, Feb 10, 2021)
‘It appears that vaccine hesitancy is due to lack of information and trust. Despite the government's assurances about Covid-19 vaccines, which include repeated television announcements by Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on Public Health Tan Sri Dr Jemilah Mahmood, many people are still hesitant to get inoculated, with some cynically telling their friends and relatives: "It's not that I don't trust the vaccines, but let's wait and see what happens to the people who will get their shots first."
‘Since efforts to build trust in public institutions, such as the Health Ministry, have been made, we need more sound bites, including building a more credible perception of the vaccines' safety and effectiveness. Hence it is good to ensure that politicians from both sides of the divide, officials and prominent figures, are among the first to be vaccinated. Leading by example, the prime minister would be among the first to be immunised when the National Immunisation Plan gets underway by the end of this month.
‘The authorities must boost public awareness of vaccine development and production, as well as their importance during a pandemic, and at the same, debunk myths. They must explain that the vaccines will not make the virus disappear since it is already too wide spread. They should also tell the public that the vaccines could prevent its spread and reduce its severity.’
Read here (New Straits Times, Feb 7, 2021)
‘Scientists have developed COVID-19 vaccines so rapidly it has exacerbated existing mistrust proliferated by social media. New research by Edelman Data & Intelligence (DxI) aims to examine and understand the psychological motivations driving attitudes at both ends of the spectrum – from vaccine resistors to vaccine adopters. By understanding the concerns and sensitivities of each group, the scientific community can tailor messaging to improve vaccine uptake.’
Read here (World Economic Forum, Feb 4, 2021)
‘A Saiful Mujani Research & Consulting survey last month found that only 37% of respondents were willing to take what might be the life-saving jab, with 40% uncertain and 17% saying they would refuse it, mostly because of concerns over safety and effectiveness. Health experts say even with a smooth rollout through hospitals and 10,000 first-level health clinics, it will be at least 15 months before the program reaches the percentage required for herd immunity among Indonesia’s 270 million-strong population. The government estimates it will need 427 million doses, factoring in a wastage of 15%, to vaccinate a targeted 181.5 million citizens, with Widodo saying he wants that done by mid-2022.’
Read here (Asia Times, Jan 18, 2021)