‘I’m not an anti-vaxxer, but …’: The shifting tides of COVID vaccine sentiment

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Vaccine uptake expert Professor Julie Leask was waiting on hold, ready to speak on the radio. She had prepared for a discussion about the science of booster shots and was armed with various facts and figures.

As she waited, the host was reading text messages aloud, one after another.

Professor Julie Leask says more people are now willing to question COVID-19 vaccines.Credit:

“I’m not an anti-vaxxer … but the COVID vaccine doesn’t work, you still get COVID,” said one listener.

“My first few shots completely smashed me … I won’t be doing it again,” said another.

Australia’s expert vaccine group recently handed down a long-awaited recommendation. It said that all adult Australians who had not had a COVID-19 infection or vaccination in the past six months could get an extra booster, and it was recommended for those aged 65 or older or who are at additional risk.

At the same time, doctors warned many of the hundreds of people dying or falling severely ill from COVID-19 in Australia were older people who hadn’t recently been vaccinated.

More than half of those Australians eligible for a fourth dose haven’t had one.

But Leask said: “What I’m noticing when I talk to the media at the moment is there’s more of a willingness to question the COVID vaccines than there was in 2021.”

So, how worried should we be about this and is the tide shifting on vaccine sentiment?

Leask said that she certainly felt like it was a more hostile environment for people publicly supporting the new recommendation. However, she said it was not unexpected at this stage of the pandemic.

More than half of those Australians eligible for a fourth dose of the COVID vaccine haven’t had one.Credit:Sydney Morning Herald

“What’s happening now is fairly typical of post-emergency phases … you have this reflective critical period where people look back on what was done, and they’re much happier to criticise it, because we’re not in that big scary emergency phase anymore,” she said.

Leask, a social scientist with the University of Sydney’s School of Nursing and Midwifery, said there would be a couple of things that most concerned her for their potential to turn the tide of vaccine sentiment.

One is the powerful stories about people who believe they have been harmed by vaccines.

“That’s not to say that we shouldn’t have those stories … but they need to be handled with care because of the potential impact on other people’s confidence in vaccines,” she said.

The other is when trusted medical professionals start rounding on vaccines, such as the British doctor who has falsely linked vaccines to autism and a physician in Nigeria who played a part in northern states in the African country boycotting polio vaccines.

“They all resulted in big drops in vaccination,” Leask said.

General practitioner Dr Anita Munoz has been noticing an element of vaccine hesitancy in the community.

“Unfortunately, health tends to be an area in which people seem to be very open to receiving information from many and varied sources, even if they’re not reputable,” she said.

The Melbourne doctor said she hadn’t been exactly inundated with booster requests since the new recommendation came out in February.

That could partly be because people were now treating their COVID vaccination as a “business-as-usual” matter to attend to when they happen to be seeing a doctor.

But Munoz was also concerned that people were holding off and waiting for winter, despite rolling waves of COVID-19 infection persisting through the warmer months.

Munoz, the spokeswoman for the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, said people should think about the COVID-19 vaccine as similar to the seasonal flu vaccine.

“We do need to continue boosting because the virus is incredibly capable of mutating and changing its properties. So it is not true to say that ‘if I’ve had two vaccines I’ve had enough’.”

There have been 14 deaths in Australia linked to COVID vaccines by the Therapeutic Goods Administration. COVID has been the underlying cause of death for more than 12,000 Australians, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data.

“Importantly, the chances of getting the conditions which we associate with vaccination [such as myocarditis] are infinitely more likely if you get the disease than if you take the vaccine,” Munoz said.

Leask said what she was observing in Australia was a slow burn of hesitancy rather than a “catch fire” situation of changing sentiment.

One of the things she and other vaccine uptake experts are keeping a close eye on is whether some of this vaccine fatigue might translate to a worrying decrease in routine childhood vaccines, but so far, she says, there are no signs of any major downturn in Australia.

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