Hongkongers Leery on Vaccine Jab

Which of these three vaccines would you want to take?

 

Should we be surprised? More than half of Hongkongers do not want to be vaccinated, up 17 percentage points over the past two months. Only 45.3 percent of people believe vaccines are safe, down from 59.6 percent two months ago.

The citywide poll was conducted by the University of Hong Kong, which also revealed fewer than three in 10 residents were prepared to take the vaccine produced by Chinese company Sinovac Biotech amid fears of its low efficacy at about 50 percent.

Leung says public needs more info on vaccines

Professor Gabriel Leung, dean of HKU's faculty of medicine said the government, the scientific community and the World Health Organization needed to provide "solid scientific evidence" to ease residents' concerns.

"Build trust by being honest, open and transparent and trust science," Leung said on Thursday. "We all need to do more explaining to the public."

The two surveys while conducted over the same period were done with different sampling methods and respondents, but Leung noted the data illustrated similar results.

He noted the proportion of residents in China polled on the same question last year was 88.6 percent, 79.8 percent in South Africa, and 67.9 percent in Singapore. But Leung said global confidence in the inoculations was broadly declining as misinformation and confusion over the shots increased.

The survey showed 55.9 percent of people accepted the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, followed by AstraZeneca shots at 35.3 percent. Sinovac at first had 38.2 percent acceptance, but it has now dropped to 29.5 percent after the release of data on its low efficacy.

We're all waiting for Lam to get inoculated first

The acceptance of the vaccines might also have to do with how the Hong Kong government rolled out the campaign. At first Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor said people would not have a choice of the vaccine and then after an uproar backtracked and said they could have a preference.

And then Sinovac not only did not produce enough vaccines for Hong Kong delivery by the end of January as promised, it also failed to publish comprehensive final phase trial data.

Like we said before, many would feel more confident watching Lam get a jab live and then scrutinizing her everyday for the following two weeks at least to see if she had any adverse side effects. How else is she going to persuade every resident to get the vaccine and reach her goal of zero infections?