Dialogue Fiji Executive Director Nilesh Lal says the success of the vaccine rollout for people under the age of 18 years will require better addressing of the determinants of hesitancy because policies such as ‘no jab, no job’ will not be effective.
According to a survey conducted by Dialogue Fiji, people aged between 45 and 54 years were eight times more reluctant to take a COVID-19 vaccine when compared with the younger age group of 18 to 24 years.
Lal says these results show that young individuals are generally more vaccine accepting and less likely to be vaccine hesitant when compared to the elderly.
He says the findings of this research will become useful to policy makers in addressing issues relating to vaccine hesitancy which will become critical to the success of that vaccination campaign.
Lal says the Pfizer vaccine which is the only approved vaccine for administration in under 18 year olds has more stringent storage and handling requirements and has a shorter shelf life.
He says therefore it is important that there is consistent vaccine uptake once stocks arrive in the country.
Lal adds that any vaccine hesitancy in parents who will be making the decision to accept the vaccine on behalf of their children will threaten the success of the roll out and also lead to vaccine wastage.
He also says that infectious disease experts no longer believe that herd immunity is possible with the current generation of vaccines as they do not block infection or further transmission and vaccinating every member of the population will become necessary.
Lal says it is important to point out that even reaching 100% of the current target population only translates to around only 65% of Fiji's total population.
He says such coverage is not enough to contain the Delta variant, let alone achieve herd immunity.
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