“The benefits from the vaccine significantly exceed any risk of the vaccine.”
This is the view of the Director of the Sagicor Cave Hill School of Business and Management, Professor Justin Robinson, on the COVID-19 vaccine. He asserts that the economic crisis is worsening faster now than the health crisis and using the vaccine as a mechanism to stave the health crisis will have a long-term effect on the former.
Robinson was speaking last week in a webinar series of broadcasts via Zoom from the Sagicor Cave Hill School of Business and Management entitled ‘COVID-19- Debunking Myths of the Jab’.
“When the pandemic started, the well-known consulting firm called McKinsey created a framework which looked at some possible scenarios for the economy in terms of how the pandemic may unfold. The reality is that we are in the B column of this projection where the public health response and interventions such as social distancing and mask wearing have been inadequate to control the spread of the virus and we are faced with a prolonged economic downturn,” he said.
Robinson observed that the outstanding progress made by the scientific community has brought several vaccines to the public in record time.
“The effort must now pass from the scientific community to an urgent collaborative effort led by government and policy makers, healthcare professionals, the private sector, and civil society. I have given a short glimpse of the scale of the economic crisis the Caribbean is facing; the high-level numbers do not tell you the reality of the crisis we are facing,” he asserted.
“Correct vaccine delivery efforts have the potential to save lives, restore livelihoods and allow us to start the next normal. The vaccines are next best effort. The vaccination initiative is so important to our lives and livelihoods and a chance to return to normal that we need to have as comprehensive of a framework as possible,” Robinson implored.
Robinson created what he calls a 6-A model which looks at the vaccination efforts across the full spectrum of activities. For this model, he said, vaccines need to be “Available, Administrable, Accessible, Acceptable, Affordable, and Accountable.”
“For us to have a successful effort and achieve around the 80% vaccinations that we need to achieve herd immunity, policymakers need a holistic perspective and to be ticking all the boxes across the 6-A perspective model.”
To some questions that arise from the economic effects of the pandemic like: how do companies deal with this vaccination effort, should employees be incentivised to take it, and what are the tools for persuading persons to take it, Robinson said:
“If you want your employees or the general population to take the vaccine, then understanding people’s reasons for hesitancy is extremely important. There seems to be a notion that because ‘people are dying and the economy is suffering, why don’t people go and get the vaccine and help us get back to normal’?”
“We know, from many years of behavioural science and behavioural economics, that human beings don’t make decisions that way. We need to be quite sophisticated and segment the population to understand that different groups have different concerns and different messages will work for different groups,” proposed Robinson, who is also head of the Department at Economics at UWI Cave Hill.
“There is a lot of information that fear is a very good tactic for getting people not to do something; but, when you want people to take an action, fear is sometimes not the best motivator. We must be prepared to use the full spectrum of techniques to make sure that the vaccine is taken up.”
Robinson assured that in virtually all of our Caribbean countries, it would be illegal to mandate vaccinations, and recommended that organisations focus on persuading or even incentivising employees to take the vaccine.
“If it is an important part of your business model then maybe offering an extra vacation day for taking the vaccine could help and encourage,” he stated.
“We are not here to sell you anything. The vaccination is a choice. Our lives have been devastated. Think of all of the children who have not had normal school for 12 months, the problems with CXCs, those persons who have died alone with their families not next to them, and people who have died and not been able to have normal funerals. The risk-return trade-off to the vaccine appears to be less than continuing with this catastrophic situation we are facing in terms of our lives and our livelihoods,” Robinson declared.
Robinson shared the panel with Dr Karen Broome-Toppin, the Pan America Health Organisation Adviser Immunisation for the Caribbean Region; Dr Kim Quimby, lecturer in Immunology at the George Allyene Chronic Disease Research Centre (GACDRC), UWI Cave Hill campus and Curriculum Coordinator of the Caribbean Cytometry and Analytical Society; as well as the Executive Director of the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA), Dr Joy St John.
This article is brought to you by Better Health Magazine.
