With Covid restrictions having ended last week, it’s tempting to think that we are now out of the woods. But to sustain this return to normality, the UK’s vaccination programme has further to go; waning immunity and the threat of new variants could yet derail the hard-won efforts to move on from the pandemic.
With vaccine take-up rates stalling, we need to understand why people are vaccine hesitant and find practical solutions to address their concerns. Certain communities such as ethnic minorities, religious groups, immigrants, and people living in socioeconomically deprived areas are more vaccine hesitant than others. Their reasons include a lack of trust in government institutions and healthcare providers, unfounded beliefs about the vaccine’s contents and concerns about long-term side-effects.
Instead of complaining about anti-vaxxers “spouting complete nonsense” and “mumbo jumbo,” as Boris Johnson did earlier this year, we need to change the way we communicate with the vaccine hesitant. The top-down, government-led, mass communication strategy has done much, but to reach the stubbornly unconvinced section of unvaccinated people, a new approach is necessary.
Valuable lessons can be learnt from Waltham Forest Council’s vaccine confidence programme, which has achieved remarkable results since its inception in November 2020. As the council is highly trusted by residents, Waltham Forest sought to capitalise on its good relationship with locals to drive up vaccination rates. Its Covid-19 vaccine confidence programme was particularly aimed at black African, black Caribbean and Pakistani communities, who reported high rates of vaccine hesitancy.
The council first of all determined what local attitudes to vaccination were. To do this, it surveyed over 11,000 residents and created a citizens’ recovery panel that represented Waltham Forest’s diverse population in terms of ethnicity, gender, age, disability, and socio-economic status. Focus groups with vaccine-hesitant residents were also conducted, in order to better understand their concerns.
From these findings, the council identified three different types of vaccine-hesitant citizen: the “reconsidering altruists,” the “receptive inquirers,” and the “passionate opposers.” This allowed it to develop particular content, channels and messages for each target audience to ensure a tailored communication strategy. Public health data was also used to direct face-to-face engagement to the neighbourhoods where vaccines are least accepted, to localise messaging to the areas that needed it most.
In addition, the council shared the stories of local residents who accepted the vaccine after initial hesitance. This included testimony from the chairman of a local mosque which was viewed by 25,000 South Asian residents.
Thanks to these efforts, over a four-month period, Waltham Forest saw a 22 per cent increase in the number of people reporting that they will get vaccinated. The vaccine confidence programme is still ongoing, with the next stage particularly aimed at increasing uptake among young people and Gypsy and Traveller communities.
Given these promising results, more must be done to ensure other councils can run similar programmes. After all, local authorities can often understand and communicate with their communities better than remote decision-makers. If the government wants to seriously tackle vaccine hesitancy, it needs to throw its weight behind targeted, grassroots interventions. This means providing greater support for councils to develop such initiatives and to share best practice.
Because at the end of the day, moral outrage, eye-rolling or scapegoating the unvaccinated isn’t going to increase vaccine uptake. With tried-and-tested case studies reporting promising results, this approach is our best hope to safeguard the UK’s recovery from the pandemic.
