Voting appears to be more important than being vaccinated

Apr 01, 2021 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – People are extremely strange creatures. When a child is born, they would ensure that, that child is vaccinated.
Some parents would take time off from their workplace just to ensure that they are taking their babies to the clinics to get the vaccines which are administered to children for measles, polio or chicken pox. Not a parent would refuse to immunise their child with these vaccines. No one has ever complained about the side effects. There are no fears about these vaccines killing any child.
Yet, when it comes to the one vaccine which every adult should be taking, there are high levels of vaccine resistance. The country only has vaccines for 72,000 persons. This should have been enough for persons over the age of 60 years of age.
There are approximately 80,000 persons between the ages of 50-60 years. Guyana does not have sufficient vaccines for this age-range. But because vaccine hesitancy is high, the authorities have been forced to begin inoculating persons 40 years and over.
Every time there is a national registration campaign, thousands of persons refuse to uplift their identification card. The authorities go to great lengths to urge persons to uplift the cards but many of them refuse to do so.
They register but refuse to uplift their identification card. There is just hesitancy in uplifting voter identification card. However, this is far less than the hesitancy to be vaccinated for the coronavirus.
There are many persons in Guyana who shy away from talking politics. Whenever the conversations get around to political issues, people would complain how they want nothing to do with politics. They complain how the politicians are only for themselves and not for the people. They show total disinterest in attending political meetings at street corners outside of the election campaign season.
But on Election Day, these same persons who profess disinterest in local politics are first in line to vote. It is an amazing spectacle. Persons, who previously, wanted nothing to do with politics are transformed overnight into political zealots.
Guyana has a high voter turnout relative to the number of persons in Guyana. The real turnout relative to those persons present and living in Guyana is among the highest in the world. Yet, the majority of Guyanese would express sentiments, which amount to voter apathy outside of the election season.
Voters are prepared to line up for more than an hour to be able to vote. Nevertheless, many of them will complain if they have to wait 15 minutes to be able to receive their COVID-19 vaccine. In fact, some of them are more interested in voting than in being vaccinated.
On Election Day, persons will phone their friends and neighbours and insist that they go out and vote. Persons would have their vehicles shuttle shut-ins and the elderly to the polling stations to vote. Political activists would go house-to-house in order to ensure that all eligible persons turn out to vote.
This same level of mobilisation is needed for the vaccination campaign. Persons should be going house-to-house to determine who is vaccinated and who is not and encourage persons to be vaccinated. Political activists should be shuttling the elderly to the vaccination centres.
But this is not happening because of the conspiracy theories which are being pedalled. People believe all manner of stories about the vaccines, which are being administered. Moreover, this is not limited to Guyana.
Some people are expressing reservations about taking the Sputnik V vaccine, never mind that it has the highest reported efficacy of all vaccines on the market. The drama, which is playing out in Europe, and now Canada, about the AstraZeneca vaccine, is also leading to Guyanese being circumspect about being vaccinated.
Vaccine hesitancy also exists in the developed world. In Canada, which has an acute shortage of vaccines, the Prime Minister has commented on vaccine hesitancy. In America, about eight percent of those polled indicated hesitancy towards taking the vaccine. If an approximate calculation is used across the population of the United States, this would add up to more than 30 million Americans.
It is no coincidence that California, which is recording the highest number of deaths and the highest number of new deaths in the USA, also has the highest rate of vaccine hesitancy.
In the face of high levels of vaccine hesitancy in Guyana, the government is doing the next best thing: administering the vaccine to the next risk group so that as many persons as possible can be vaccinated.
But even with 200,000 Sputnik V vaccines due over the next month that will not be enough to crush the local coronavirus epidemic. Cases are rising each day. And over the past week, an average of 12 persons is in the COVID-19 ICU. There are more than 900 active cases and given that the majority of these cases is concentrated in one Region, this is a frightening development.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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