Uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine increased globally, from 75.2 percent in 2021 to 79.1 percent in 2022, according to a survey conducted in 23 countries representing more than 60 percent of the world’s population.
However, uptake of the vaccine declined in eight countries and almost one in eight vaccinated people surveyed, particularly younger men and women, were reluctant to receive a booster dose.
The study, led by Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) and the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH) and published in ‘Nature Medicine’, underscores great variability between countries and the need to adapt communication strategies to address vaccination reluctance.
The diverse nature of vaccine reluctance
In some countries, vaccine reluctance was associated with variables such as being female (for example, China, Poland, and Russia), not having a college degree (for example, France, Poland, South Africa, Sweden, and the US) or have a lower income (for example, Canada, Germany, Turkey and the United Kingdom). Furthermore, the profile of people paying less attention to the pandemic varied from country to country.
“Our results show that public health strategies to increase coverage of booster doses will need to be more sophisticated and adaptable to each setting and target population,” he says. Jeffrey Lazarus, head of ISGlobal’s Health Systems Research Group -center promoted by the “la Caixa” Foundation-. “To improve vaccine uptake, strategies need to include messages that convey compassion rather than fear and use trusted messengers, particularly health professionals,” she adds.
The current situation of COVID-19 in Spain
The new variant of Ómicron, XBB.1.5, continues without giving alarm signals in Europe in general or in Spain in particular. The first cases in our country were detected at the Gregorio Marañón Hospital. Patricia Muñoz, Head of the Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases Service, explains to GM how they are looking at this new variant: “it has been declared a variant of interest because of the great speed with which it has displaced its competitors in the United States. It began to be detected in October and there are already areas where it accounts for 80 percent of the strains. Like any variant that prevails over others, to prevail it has to be more contagious”. “We are concerned to some extent because these variants that are becoming dominant, we have been seeing them for a long time and many of them have not even had a significant clinical impact. People have not even known that this has happened, ”he adds.
This virus, a sublineage of Omicron, has a single mutation, with accumulation of the SPIKE protein, which causes it to attach more quickly and more easily to the human cell. Therefore, it is more easily transmitted. Hence, it circulates in nearly 40 countries.
“EIt is very good that we are actively monitoring itnot only as a response to when public health detects an emergency situation or an outbreak and asks us to analyze these, but as Gregorio Marañón does, sequencing all the positives. That is what has allowed us to detect something that is undoubtedly already circulating in our community” explains the Head of the Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases Service.
Vaccination in front
In the same vein, it manifests Raúl Ortiz de Lejarazu, professor of Microbiology: “its severity does not concern. It is not different from others of the Omicron lineage and much smaller than Beta or Delta. What everyone should understand at this point in the pandemic is that the main evolutionary factor of a virus is not its severity but its speed of replication, that is, its ability to multiply is what allows it to prevail over other variants. Progress continues towards milder forms of the disease, especially for people vaccinated and those already infected before”.
precisely, the FDA just announced a change in the vaccination system against SARS-CoV2: the vaccination campaign will be annual in the United States. In autumn and in a similar way to that of the common flu. As in the Old Continent, it also proposes that people who get the vaccine for the first time can receive from the beginning the doses designed to face, at the same time, the Ómicron variant and the original. The current regulation established that the original vaccine was received first, followed by boosters with doses that attack the new variants developed by the virus.
Have a clean shave concludes -taking into account that “there have not been super infections at Christmas, nor has there been another wave, hospitalization rates have dropped and ICU rates as well”- that, at this moment in the history of the virus, “we should focus on monitoring its penetration through analysis of excreta from airplanes and airports; do not disturb people; Calculate reinfection rates in those already infected, infection rates in those vaccinated, and take precautions in the most vulnerable population (over 80 years of age) and in those with chronic pathologies. And very, very especially, in residences for the elderly or for the chronically ill”.
