'Classist' vaccine advice risks further hesitancy among BIPOC communities, expert says

Louisa Taylor and her team have spent months translating public health announcements and explaining the benefits of vaccination to immigrant communities in Ottawa.

Language barriers, lack of resources and vaccine hesitancy are just some of the issues she's trying to address during the COVID-19 pandemic.

So on May 3, when the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) recommended one set of vaccines over another, Taylor said she was alarmed.

"If the message we've been trying to give is the best vaccine is the first one you can get, this really flies in the face of that," said Taylor, director of Refugee613, an organization that helps new Canadians get settled.

Maybe NACI should ...leave the public out of it, because clearly their messaging is not designed for public consumption.- Raywat Deonandan, University of Ottawa

Taylor said she felt the method used to communicate the new recommendations was a complete disaster because some within Ottawa'sBIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of colour) communities are already hesitant about getting inoculated, given decades of systemic inequities within the health-care system.

"There's some basic principles and practices of communications that just don't seem to be observed here, and the first is thinking through how your messaging conflicts with the messaging you've given before [and] how it's going to land with specific audiences," she said.

Confusing message

NACI'srecommendation that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine only be administered to people 30 and over, coupled withprevious advice that theAstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine only be used for people 55 and over,also troublesRaywat Deonandan, a epidemiologist at the University of Ottawa.

Deonandan took issue with NACI's use of the word "preferred," which he said sounded "classist" because it could create a hierarchy of upper- and lower-tiervaccines.

"Part of me wants to say maybe NACI should speak directly to provinces and policy makers, leave the public out of it, because clearly their messaging is not designed for public consumption," said Deonandan.

NACI messaging about preferred vaccines troubling, epidemiologist says

3 years ago

Duration 1:13

Raywat Deonandan, an epidemiologist at the University of Ottawa, says the language used by the National Advisory Committee on Immunization was troubling and suggests that there are different tiers of vaccines, which is not the case.

Hesitancy rooted in mistrust

Over the past several months, Taylor and company have helped coordinate the production of multilingual resources to create a vaccine bulletin to ensure the newest information is reaching immigrant communities. She said NACI's latest position may have undermined some of those efforts.

"This is one area where civil society volunteers on the ground, community leaders, faith leaders are having to scramble, scramble, scramble and fill the gaps, which againmakes it even more frustrating," she said.

Taylor said vaccinehesitancy is rooted in mistrust of a health-care system that can at times exclude certain populations.

On top of that, she said the public information around vaccines is not often in plain language or easy to understand, which leaves room for misinformation to spread within a community group through social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook.

"We are always up against more prevalent, more sophisticated or more voluminous misinformation. We're always kind of playing catch up," she said.

Deonandan said no one should be advising against the use of the vaccines that have already been so widely distributed.

"AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson [have] been taken by tens of millionsif not hundreds of millions of people around the world. It is the world's vaccine," he said. "Vaccines remain our single best way out of this hellscape."