For a vaccination campaign to be successful, those in charge need to be informed in advance about the arguments and concerns of the people who oppose it, including interpersonal communications, in order to fine-tune a pertinent strategy of vaccination. communication for each group.
That is one of the recommendations of a survey of 1,173 people from Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela, to find out the causes that threaten better vaccination coverage against COVID-19which found that myths, misinformation, unfounded fears and structural barriers are the main conditioning factors.
The study is part of an initiative by researchers from Ohio University, the University of Manizales, the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador and the Universidad Central de Venezuela to generate data that can be useful for the governments of the three countries and focus communication strategies directly on those populations who refuse to be vaccinated.
Those countries were chosen for their high per capita contagion rates since the pandemic began. Colombia registers more than 6 million, Ecuador more than 800,000 and Venezuela more than 516,000. In addition, their vaccination campaigns began a week apart.
The results, published in Health Communicationsshow that Ecuadorians are twice as likely to believe in myths such as that vaccines do not work or cause more problems than they solve, that natural immunity is better, or that COVID-19 is not dangerous.
This matches the results obtained at the end of 2021 by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INEC) of Ecuador, which found that of the 1.3 million people who are not willing to be vaccinated, more than 50 percent fear side effects and almost 10 percent believe that vaccines are not effective.
In contrast, Colombia, which, like Ecuador, has one of the highest rates of vaccination in Latin America, presented the lowest results in terms of reasons for not getting vaccinated.
Instead, Venezuelans are twice as likely to believe that they will not be able to afford a COVID-19 vaccine than Colombians or Ecuadorians. This may be because although the vaccines provided by the government are free, there are reports of a black market distributing them since mid-2021.
For reasons like this, the study acknowledges, they are four times more likely to express distrust in their government’s ability to implement a vaccination program.
For Marino González, a public policy specialist at the Simón Bolívar University in Venezuela, the crisis of confidence is one of the key aspects that led to the fact that at the end of December 2021 almost 10 percent of the Venezuelan population was not willing to be vaccinated, according to data from A study of the Delphos Institute, carried out in the absence of an official registry of vaccines applied in that country.
González, who did not participate in the Health Communication study, explained that unlike other countries in the region, such as Chile or Uruguay, Venezuela did not have a well-structured vaccination plan, which added to the opacity with which it has been handled. information regarding the pandemic has had a negative impact on the population.
“In those countries in which there is no complete, regular and transparent information, a lot of uncertainty is generated and therefore changes in decision-making,” said González in an interview with SciDev.Net.
“Any good act of communication must address people as individuals and not just as a large group. We have to understand and talk to people in this way if we want to change their behavior.”
Benjamin Bates, Ohio University, USA
This problem has had similar impacts in Ecuador, where trust in the Ministry of Health has decreased as a result of the crisis of lack of medicines in the country’s public hospitals, he explained to SciDev.Net Camila Montesinos, specialist in global health and development from University College London.
“There is an association between those who cannot access information [veraz] and those with limited access to Health in the public sector. If there are no medications and the staff is reduced, people will also continue to distrust what the government can say about health,” said Montesinos, who was also not part of the investigation.
Benjamin Bates, a health communication specialist and lead author of the study, told SciDev.Net that the most common communication error of governments around the world has been to assume that “people only have irrational beliefs about the vaccine, treating it as if they had a lack of knowledge”.
For Bates, mistrust begins when people are bombarded by multiple sources with different information, but are also enhanced by various structural barriers, such as limited access to services. This is why knowing your reasons well will help generate more effective messages.
“Any good act of communication must address people as individuals and not just as a large group. We have to understand and talk to people in this way if we want to change their behavior,” she concluded.
> Link to the abstract of the study in Health Communications
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