Haldimand-Norfolk top doc urges people to seek good information about vaccines
If you have questions about the COVID-19 vaccine, it's important to get more information from credible sources, like your family physician, said Haldimand Norfolk Health Unit's interim chief medical officer of health, Dr. Alex Hukowich, during a media call June 7.
(For) people who are hesitant and need more information, there are a variety of sources for them," he said. Unfortunately, sometimes those sources are what I would call legitimate, and sometimes those sources simply promote a lot of these conspiracies."
While vaccine hesitancy is often used as an umbrella term for anyone who has chosen not yet get their COVID-19 vaccine yet, Hukowich said that in his opinion, it really only applies to those who are seeking more information before making a decision.
Clearly, there are some people that are just totally against all immunization for one kind of reason or another. And then there's a group of people that I put into that conspiracy theorist group. I hate to even mention the kinds of theories that these people support or believe in, because I certainly wouldn't want them repeated. They are such nonsensical things," he said.
In my own view, you can't deal with people that are anti-vaxxers and you can't deal with people that are these conspiracy theorists, because no matter what information you provide, it will not change their mind."
One of the main concerns people have voiced about the vaccines is the relative speed with which they were developed, but health unit epidemiologist Dr. Kate Bishop-Williams said that was because scientists weren't starting from square one.
These vaccines are, while seemingly developed very quickly, based on science that's been developing over the last 10 years and more. There's a lot of similarities between COVID-19 and SARS," she said, referring to the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome in the early 2000s.
Not only that, but Bishop-Williams noted that researchers and scientists are normally looking at a vast array of diseases across the world at any given time, but with the coronavirus pandemic, All of those resources were funnelled into a shared common cause," she said. We are not used to having the resources devoted to a vaccine development the way they were devoted to this in 2020 and 2021."
Bishop-Williams said that on a local level, the health unit is seeing the effectiveness of the vaccines when it comes to protecting the population, evidenced by the steady decline in new cases as more people are inoculated.
Those who are unvaccinated are making up the majority of our (new) cases right now. Those who are partially vaccinated do make up a small portion of our cases, and those who are fully vaccinated make up an incredibly minute portion ... about 1.5 per cent of all cases over the last month," she said.
Even then, the majority of the fully vaccinated people who tested positive for coronavirus were asymptomatic, and the only reason they were tested was as part of the screening process because they'd had a high-risk exposure, Bishop-Williams said.
Our severe cases are happening among those who are unvaccinated. That gives us a really strong indication that the vaccination program is working," she said. Not just at a provincial or a federal level, but we can see from our own local data that it's really working."
Hukowich noted that while no vaccine provides perfect protection against a disease, he is still urging everyone who is eligible to get a vaccine to do so.
If there is a way out of this problem, I think the vaccines will lead us in that way," he said. Once we have much, much lower case counts, this thing may go away. We're still nowhere near that point, but we at least are headed in the right direction."