Comment: COVID-19 – talk of ‘vaccine hesitancy’ lets governments off the hook
. But more investigations are needed into how party politics and political ideology shape the policies that governments end up pursuing, and what factors make a specific policy, such as a vaccine mandate for travel, succeed or fail in a given setting.Often, what has actually been slowing the uptake of vaccines in countries where supplies are plentiful is problems with access — problems that governments could take steps to address.
In Australia, coverage rates for COVID-19 vaccines are 7–26% lower in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities than in the overall population . When discussing drivers of low vaccine uptake in Aboriginal communities last August, the minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, argued that “some people have made choices because they’ve become fearful of adverse effects”.
Various media reports homed in on vaccine hesitancy as the explanation. But Black scholars, community leaders and investigative journalists have pointed to important systemic issues. Among them is that an age-based roll-out does not take into account the disparate effects of race and social determinants of health. This means that some at-risk Black and Hispanic citizens — who have higher death rates from COVID-19 across all age groups — had to wait longer than did their white counterparts.
But a closer look at why some people are not getting vaccinated indicates that the problems are more complicated and, invariably, they start further up the chain. Also, issues around access feed into issues around acceptance. If governments fail to reach people promptly with easy-to-get vaccines and clear encouragement, other messages fill the void and people are likely to grow more worried about getting vaccinated.
Take some of the women we spoke to last August as part of a large interdisciplinary research project called Coronavax, which was designed to establish what people in Western Australia think and feel about COVID-19 vaccines, and why. Larmina, a refugee from Afghanistan, now lives in Perth, which until recently had no community transmission of COVID-19.
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