"Vaccine hesitancy" is one of the new terms we have learned in our era of the epidemic. There may be good reasons for some reluctance to have the jab but there may also be unacceptable ones.
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But make no mistake: hesitancy is ultimately harmful.
Researchers at the Burnet Institute in Melbourne say that Australia is unlikely to achieve herd immunity (in which the virus peters out because not enough people catch it and then re-transmit it) while the current levels of reluctance remain.
The medical researchers, who have a global reputation of excellence, modelled different scenarios for the way the pandemic will play out. They found that all the extra public health measures like testing, tracing and the isolating of cases would still be needed unless more people get vaccinated.
In other words, unless more people get vaccinated, there will be no return to anything approaching pre-COVID "normality".
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There may be some understandable reasons for reluctance. The early reports of blood clots associated with the AstraZeneca jab were given far too much weight. The health authorities recommended that people under 50 should be offered an alternative to the AstraZeneca vaccine.
But many medicines have side effects. Doctors learn about them and prescribe accordingly. If every highly unlikely side-effect of every medicine was given big publicity, we might be hesitant about many other highly beneficial drugs.
The Health Department now says: "There is a very low chance of this side effect, which may occur in around four to six people in every million after being vaccinated."
Justifiable reluctance can be addressed by persuasion. The government should strive to remove legitimate doubts with unassailable facts.
But reluctance seems deep-seated. On the latest figures, about one in five adult Australians have been vaccinated. Another half of the population want to be vaccinated.
But that leaves around a quarter who don't want to be vaccinated or who don't know whether they do. Some may wrongly imagine that they can keep themselves isolated from further outbreaks. But, as Melbourne knows, the virus will keep coming back.
Some may also see it as a matter of personal freedom. This, though, is an irresponsible and wrong-headed argument. Our personal freedoms are often curtailed for the greater good of society. We do not have the freedom to drive as we like. People with sexually transmitted diseases face prison sentences of up to 25 years if they have sex knowingly and transmit their disease.
The government needs to do all it can to remove the legitimate doubts.
It should also move more quickly on opening the border. It may be politically convenient to delay the opening but the delay means people might imagine that they can postpone the jab.
Only when a large proportion of the population is vaccinated can we get our normal lives back. The Health Department says: "Herd immunity from immunisations refers to when somewhere around 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the population have some degree of protection."
On the current evidence, we are not heading to anywhere near that level and without it, the virus will recur in a never-ending cycle of infection and re-infection, all complicated by new variants.
A return to true normality demands more vaccination.
This story Remove all doubts, we must vaccinate first appeared on The Canberra Times.