Tag: vaccination

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Now it gets more difficult

From the University of Melbourne’s Vaccine Hesitancy Tracker:

Vaccine hesitancy across Australia has fallen from 21.8% on 7th August to 20.3% on 20th August

This fall is concentrated amongst those who were previously unsure, with 8.6% unsure on 20th August compared to 9.8% two weeks earlier. The percentage unwilling to be vaccinated has not changed much in the past month

Vaccine hesitancy in NSW is still the lowest in Australia. However, hesitancy has increased slightly in NSW despite the continuing rise in cases of COVID-19, from 17.3% on 7th August to 18% on 20th August

In NSW over the last two weeks, more people are unwilling to be vaccinated (from 9.2% to 11.8%) and fewer are unsure (from 8.1% to 6.2%). Those who are unsure are more likely to be influenced by incentives. More information can be found in this Research Insight article

Source: Vaccine Hesitancy Tracker

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Who could have seen this?

An interesting post on Social behavior and the covid pandemic, but the last bit of this quote jumped out at me:

But here’s the thing: what 2010-era sociologist or political scientist would have predicted that a major global pandemic would occur in the next several decades, that an almost miraculous search for an effective vaccine would be successful in an amazingly short period — and that the pandemic and vaccine would become a political issue leading to mass refusal to vaccinate? All global epidemiologists believed the first proposition — that pandemic would occur sometime; some biological researchers thought that vaccine creation could advance quickly; but I can’t think of any respected political scientist or sociologist who would have predicted the massive movement that has emerged against vaccination and the politicization of the spread of the virus. 

Social behavior and the covid pandemic – Understanding Society

I can’t think of many social scientists working in vaccination who haven’t been thinking about this for at least a decade.

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Chasing vaccine records

I was quoted in yesterday’s Herald in a piece about people whose COVID vaccination records have gone missing. I’ve been whingeing about this to anyone who’ll listen for the past few months. For a while, it seemed like the easiest thing would be to get another vacination. It’s good to hear that I’m not alone.

The issue seems to have been that the Immunisation Register doesn’t like hyphens or apostrophes in people’s names (seriously). Even if this only affects one percent of people, that’s 60,000 in NSW alone.

Anyway, the story was tweeted by Bill Shorten, which is a pretty good sign I’ve made a mistake by complaining about it.

I’ve made a terrible mistake.