![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A shot in the arm
Jan. 4th, 2021 10:30 amDespite all the bad news of politicians behaving badly, Covid numbers surging in Ottawa, scary new virulent virus variants, ill-advised or inconsistent lockdown protocols and forecasts of a brutal winter ahead of us, I want today to turn the spotlight on the light instead of the potentially long tunnel preceding it. Folks, vaccination days are here to stay, for as long as it takes.
I don't think too many people would quibble about who's on first to get the vaccinated: front-line health care workers and those in congregate living situations. After that, there's considerably more disagreement on where people rank in the order of vaccination priority. Do we reward what some see as bad behaviour and target super-spreaders ahead of the ones patiently waiting their turn? Do we employ sarcasm and blatant insults against the vaccine-hesitant and out-and-out vaccine-averse, without first taking their pulse and listening to their concerns?
I think informational and emotional appeals both have their place but the experts do need to respect the public. They need to frankly admit what they know and don't know, what they are considering as reasonable provisional assumptions, and which of their projected scenarios are pure speculation. A communications strategy designed around a couple of simplistic "key messages", treating citizens as pawns to be manipulated at will according to partisan political goals, is bound to fail in the end.
As far as my own health care is concerned, I've been quite pleased by communications from my family doctor's office, the Riverside South Medical Centre. They've been keeping in touch with me by e-mail on a regular basis both before and after lockdown and some time during the second wave, I got an e-mail invitation from them to register for the "Health Myself" portal. On December 30, I got an e-mail with general information for their patients about COVID-19 vaccination. It listed the first-tier priority groups and promised to contact me again as further information became available. There was also a helpful list of FAQs, including the following link to the product monograph for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine:
https://covid-vaccine.canada.ca/info/pdf/pfizer-biontech-covid-19-vaccine-pm1-en.pdf
It's quite comprehensive and I'll be referring to it again. I haven't seen anything comparable for the Moderna vaccine or the Astra Zeneca (Oxford) vaccine; and there will of course be others to come. In the initial stages, it doesn't look as if we'll have a choice of which one we get.
Then of course there's the thorny issue of vaccine passports, which is rather more controversial than those little yellow booklets that some of us may remember from our school days. That's definitely a topic for another time!
I don't think too many people would quibble about who's on first to get the vaccinated: front-line health care workers and those in congregate living situations. After that, there's considerably more disagreement on where people rank in the order of vaccination priority. Do we reward what some see as bad behaviour and target super-spreaders ahead of the ones patiently waiting their turn? Do we employ sarcasm and blatant insults against the vaccine-hesitant and out-and-out vaccine-averse, without first taking their pulse and listening to their concerns?
I think informational and emotional appeals both have their place but the experts do need to respect the public. They need to frankly admit what they know and don't know, what they are considering as reasonable provisional assumptions, and which of their projected scenarios are pure speculation. A communications strategy designed around a couple of simplistic "key messages", treating citizens as pawns to be manipulated at will according to partisan political goals, is bound to fail in the end.
As far as my own health care is concerned, I've been quite pleased by communications from my family doctor's office, the Riverside South Medical Centre. They've been keeping in touch with me by e-mail on a regular basis both before and after lockdown and some time during the second wave, I got an e-mail invitation from them to register for the "Health Myself" portal. On December 30, I got an e-mail with general information for their patients about COVID-19 vaccination. It listed the first-tier priority groups and promised to contact me again as further information became available. There was also a helpful list of FAQs, including the following link to the product monograph for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine:
https://covid-vaccine.canada.ca/info/pdf/pfizer-biontech-covid-19-vaccine-pm1-en.pdf
It's quite comprehensive and I'll be referring to it again. I haven't seen anything comparable for the Moderna vaccine or the Astra Zeneca (Oxford) vaccine; and there will of course be others to come. In the initial stages, it doesn't look as if we'll have a choice of which one we get.
Then of course there's the thorny issue of vaccine passports, which is rather more controversial than those little yellow booklets that some of us may remember from our school days. That's definitely a topic for another time!
