Challenges in ensuring global access to COVID-19 vaccines: production, affordability, allocation, and deployment.

BACKGROUND: Vaccine hesitancy poses serious challenges for achieving coverage for population immunity. It is necessary to achieve high COVID-19 vaccination acceptance rates and medical students' coverage as future health care providers. The study aimed to explore the level of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and determine the factors and barriers that may affect vaccination decision-making. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was carried out among medical students in Tanta and Kafrelsheikh Universities, Egypt. Data collection was done via an online questionnaire during January 2021 from 2133 students. RESULTS: The majority of the participant students (90.5%) perceived the importance of the COVID-19 vaccine, 46% had vaccination hesitancy, and an equal percentage (6%) either definitely accepted or refused the vaccine. Most of the students had concerns regarding the vaccine's adverse effects (96.8%) and ineffectiveness (93.2%). The most confirmed barriers of COVID-19 vaccination were deficient data regarding the vaccine's adverse effects (potential 74.17% and unknown 56.31%) and insufficient information regarding the vaccine itself (72.76%). CONCLUSION: The government, health authority decision-makers, medical experts, and universities in Egypt need to work together and make efforts to reduce hesitancy and raise awareness about vaccinations, consequently improving the acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/jmv.26910

Vaccine hesitancy: Beliefs and barriers associated with COVID-19 vaccination among Egyptian medical students.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/3/210/pdf

Acceptance of a COVID-19 Vaccine in Japan during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Measuring vaccine hesitancy, confidence, trust and flu vaccine uptake: Results of a national survey of White and African American adults.

Covid-19 vaccine acceptance, hesitancy, and refusal among Canadian healthcare workers: A multicenter survey.

Vaccine hesitancy among healthcare workers in Europe: A qualitative study.

Risk communication has been identified as a core competence for guiding public health responses to infectious disease threats. The International Health Regulations (2005) call for all countries to build capacity and a comprehensive understanding of health risks before a public health emergency to allow systematic and coherent communication, response and management. Research studies indicate that while outbreak and crisis communication concepts and tools have long been on the agenda of public health officials, there is still a need to clarify and integrate risk communication concepts into more standardised practices and improve risk communication and health, particularly among disadvantaged populations. To address these challenges, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) convened a group of risk communication experts to review and integrate existing approaches and emerging concepts in the development of a training curriculum. This curriculum articulates a new approach in risk communication moving beyond information conveyance to knowledge- and relationship-building. In a pilot training this approach was reflected both in the topics addressed and in the methods applied. This article introduces the new conceptual approach to risk communication capacity building that emerged from this process, presents the pilot training approach developed, and shares the results of the course evaluation.

/pdf/risk-communication-as-a-core-public-health-competence-in-i3y5wb3yui.pdf

Risk communication as a core public health competence in infectious disease management: Development of the ECDC training curriculum and programme.

Communication interventions during public health emergencies (e.g. infectious disease outbreaks) are increasingly acknowledged as a determinant of success in preparedness, response and recovery. Challenges related to the current outbreak of Ebola virus in West Africa once again reveal the need to strengthen our understanding of the central importance and complexity of risk communication and social mobilisation strategies. There is little hard evidence, however, on the impact of various communication interventions upon the dynamics of public health emergencies to guide our capacity development. This article proposes a new evaluative framework which builds on an understanding of risk communication as an interactive, holistic, continuous and engaging activity that focuses on dialogue, intelligence gathering, building relationships over time with a knowledge base informed by new and accessible communication technologies (e.g. social media and networks) and supportive environments. Our hypothesis is th...

Making sense of communication interventions in public health emergencies – an evaluation framework for risk communication

Overview 
International activities to respond to the Ebola crisis in West Africa were mainly developed and focussed around the biomedical paradigm of Western health systems. This approach was often insensitive to societal perception, attitude, and behavioural determinants and clashed with community-based health traditions, narratives, and roles, e.g., of community health workers. In this peer-led capacity-building initiative, these deficiencies were identified and analysed. Innovative, more locally focussed, community-based solutions were articulated. The new approaches described put local people at the centre of all preparedness, response, and recovery strategies. This paradigm shift reframed the role of communities from victims to active managers of their response and reacknowledged the strength of community-based One Health. We conclude that strategies should aim at empowering, not just engaging, communities. Communities can improve short-term crisis management and build longer-term resilience and capacities that are much needed in the current global health climate.


Background 
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa, 2014–2016, was unprecedented in scale, extent, and duration. The international community was slow to step up its assistance in this global public health emergency and then faltered when its infection control management approaches clashed with West African realities [1]. Outbreak response evaluations have identified the need to better integrate social science intelligence [2], better collaborate with communities [3,4], more effectively draw on the strength of community health workers [5], and critically question the paradigm of Western health systems, which focus on imposing ‘evidence-based’ solutions that lack external validity in affected communities; i.e., they too often recommend actions that are inconsistent with, ignore, or violate traditional behaviours [6].

While there appears to be a consensus now on what needs to be done, how to achieve these goals remains a challenge.

/pdf/kampala-manifesto-building-community-based-one-health-cvmxkw83og.pdf

Kampala manifesto: Building community-based One Health approaches to disease surveillance and response-The Ebola Legacy-Lessons from a peer-led capacity-building initiative.

Franklin Apfel

Papers

Vaccine hesitancy among healthcare workers in Europe: A qualitative study.

Risk communication as a core public health competence in infectious disease management: Development of the ECDC training curriculum and programme.

Making sense of communication interventions in public health emergencies – an evaluation framework for risk communication

Kampala manifesto: Building community-based One Health approaches to disease surveillance and response-The Ebola Legacy-Lessons from a peer-led capacity-building initiative.

Risk and crisis communication