Chatham-Kent’s top doctor hopes awareness will ease vaccine hesitancy

Chatham-Kent’s top doctor is hoping awareness and dialogue will continue to ease vaccine hesitancy, not just for COVID-19 but other infectious diseases.

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Speaking during Thursday’s board of health meeting, Shanker Nesathurai, the municipality’s acting medical officer of health, said Ontario has an effective system in place to help protect the public from illness.

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He said it’s well known that vaccines save lives by preventing numerous illnesses.

“The provincial vaccine program provides vaccines for a variety of diseases, including polio, whooping cough, diphtheria, mumps, tetanus, meningitis, and the human papillomavirus,” he said. “For young people, these vaccines are provided without charge.”

Although there always have been people hesitant, or opposed to, vaccines in general, vaccination campaigns implemented during the pandemic led to additional opposition and exhaustion, board members heard.

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However, Nesathurai cited polio as an example of what the medical community can do.

“We’ve lived without polio in this province, for what, 30 to 35 years,” he said. “Despite all these advances, we’re now facing this challenge called vaccine hesitancy.”

This hesitancy can range from delay in acceptance to outright refusal.

Nesathurai said the causes of this hesitancy are complex, including complacency, lack of convenience, and lack of confidence in vaccines.

He said the health unit already has made inroads with improving convenience, as people can get vaccinated at schools, pharmacies, workplaces and various other locations.

Given this fact, he said the priority should be improving confidence.

“Today, our culture is more skeptical of people in authority,” Nesathurai said. “And, as a general construct, I think that’s a good thing.

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“I think that moving forward, we have to present a balanced message with vaccines.”

He said vaccines are safe and rigorously tested. Vaccinated people also are less likely to become sick, he said, which has spinoff benefits, such as improving health-care capacity.

“If you’re not sick, you’re less likely to give it to somebody else…That’s worth something,” he said. “If there are less people who are sick, then there are less people who need the hospital and health-care providers. Which means that more resources can be spent on other health conditions.

“I hope that dialogue will ultimately lead to more engagement.”

Marnie Van Vlymen, program manager and chief nursing officer, told the board the health unit has seen more requests for exemptions from the public.

“There’s been so much about vaccines in the last little bit and we’re seeing kind of an exhaustion,” she said. (But) there’s a big reason why we have all of these vaccines, and why we need to make sure that that confidence is still left, and that knowledge is out there.”

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