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Opinion: What South Korea Can Teach Us About Vaccine Hesitancy

 

In early September, officials in South Korea announced an ambitious plan to vaccinate 30 million people against the flu — 10 million more than last year, an increase aimed at keeping down rates of the flu while the country battled the coronavirus.

But as The Times reported last week, the internet soon got in the way. As the vaccine was distributed, a few logistical problems popped up, and South Koreans began circulating grave stories online — pictures of vaccine boxes that looked like they had been stored unsafely, reports of vaccine contaminated with mysterious white particles.

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ANALYSIS: The Swiss Cheese Model of Pandemic Defense

Lately, in the ongoing conversation about how to defeat the coronavirus, experts have made reference to the “Swiss cheese model” of pandemic defense.

The metaphor is easy enough to grasp: Multiple layers of protection, imagined as cheese slices, block the spread of the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. No one layer is perfect; each has holes, and when the holes align, the risk of infection increases. But several layers combined — social distancing, plus masks, plus hand-washing, plus testing and tracing, plus ventilation, plus government messaging — significantly reduce the overall risk. Vaccination will add one more protective layer.

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Facebook bans false claims about COVID-19 vaccines

PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) - Facebook Inc on Thursday said it would remove false claims about COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts, following a similar announcement by Alphabet Inc’s YouTube in October.

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Psychologist Says Tailored Messaging Is Key For Effective Public Health Policy

For public health leaders, understanding different communication styles and preferences — and how people respond to them — is key to reducing the spread of the coronavirus.

Humans often don't behave logically. Their decisions don't always follow the evidence.

Those are among the ideas that Gaurav Suri considers in his work studying decision-making and motivation. He's an experimental psychologist and a computational neuroscientist at San Francisco State University.

Not surprisingly, choosing the right words matters a lot when it comes to public policy.

Something as basic as how public health officials talk about wearing a mask — for example, as "protection" instead of a "mandate," could make a difference, Suri says.

Here are excerpts from Suri's interview with All Things Considered.

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How South Korea’s Flu Vaccine Scare Offers Lessons for Other Nations

SEOUL, South Korea — The deaths were mounting, and so were the public’s fears.

South Korea had vastly expanded its flu vaccine program to cover millions more people, to prevent a one-two punch to its health system as the coronavirus spread globally. But as the injections got underway, reports of deaths started popping up.

South Korean scientists quickly determined that the deaths were unrelated to the flu shots. But they worried that if they didn’t stop the panic, the public might shun the vaccines altogether.

So health officials doubled down — and, in the process, gave the world a game plan for when coronavirus vaccines become widely available.

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