Leading health authorities shared data, observations and recommendations on worldwide COVID-19 vaccination efforts on Friday at the FIU Global Experts’ Summit. With thousands watching online, speakers from Latin America, Europe, Africa and the United States as well as representatives of the World Health Organization discussed what many recognize as “amazing progress” toward the eradication of COVID-19.
Led by Dr. Carlos Espinal, director of the Global Health Consortium within the Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work, and the Office of the President, the gathering presented an ideal opportunity to reach across borders and organizations to address pressing questions.
“We need to consider that in a record amount of time we don’t have one vaccine that works, we have many,” said Dr. Oscar Franco, director of the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Bern. COVID-19 vaccine capacity is expected to exceed six billion doses this year with several companies turning out approved products already in use around the world.
Even with the good news that multiple efficacious vaccines have been developed, how to ensure that they are distributed equitably and how to encourage acceptance among the public remain critically important questions.
Anti-vaccine misinformation and disinformation campaigns - hundreds of social media sites, for example, currently spread falsehoods about inoculation - as well as vaccine hesitancy based on mistrust or lack of awareness together could detail the international push to vaccinate.
Chaim Rafalowksi serves as disaster management and European Union project coordinator in Israel, which has established an efficient model for reaching its dense population. Already all nursing home residents there have been inoculated, and he reported that the demographic of 65 and older is protected at a “factor of 92 percent,” based on inoculation combined with recovery from illness.
Still, Rafalowksi says, vaccine doses currently sit unused because of pushback from various groups, among them the ultra-Orthodox religious communities who view vaccine with skepticism as well as younger people.
“We have the vaccines, and we don’t have the people queuing,” he said, despite early successes in his country. “We are struggling with that exactly because we underestimated the concerns of people. It’s way beyond the technical thing. It’s about talking to people. It’s about personal trust. People don’t want to have educated lectures, they want to have a dialogue. ‘Don’t preach to me, allow me to ask questions, share my concerns.’”
Panelists agreed on the need for improved communication and that health providers should proceed with honesty, transparency, empathy and respect.
The issue of fair and equitable distribution also looms large at a time when supply is woefully insufficient to meet world demand. Poor countries, in particular, cannot afford the first vaccines that have reached the market, and prices for those might have been driven up even further following the private agreements between vaccine makers and countries able to pay top dollar for their products.
COVAX, the WHO initiative to distribute vaccines to low- and middle-income countries - Ghana last week received the first of such a shipment - has tried to address the problem, but roll out is slow.
Any decrease in the pace of vaccination poses a risk to public health, the experts agreed, particularly with the rise of COVID-19 variants. These genetically mutated versions of the coronavirus that causes the disease appear more transmissible than the original.