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There is good news and there is bad news.

According to the National Income Dynamics Study — Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey (NIDS-CRAM), which was released yesterday, 71% of South African adults say they would be willing to get a COVID-19 vaccine if one was offered to them.

In terms of achieving vaccine ‘herd immunity’ that is a promising number.

However, the painfully slow vaccine rollout in this country means that we’re bracing ourselves for a third wave, with variants of concern now being identified in various provinces.

Data from the survey above was recorded between February 2 and March 10, reports Business Day, with more than 5 600 interviews conducted across the country.

The bad news comes in two parts, so let’s touch on the first:

While the study’s estimate of people’s willingness to get vaccinated was the highest yet recorded in SA, it was conducted before the government temporarily paused the use of Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J) Covid-19 vaccine pending a safety investigation triggered by US reports of extremely rare blood clots, said study co-author Ronelle Burger, an economist at the University of Stellenbosch.

Fears and concerns about receiving the vaccine could have been heightened by the pause, she said. Vaccine hesitancy was dynamic, and might also shift as the vaccine rollout gained momentum, she said.

That really was out of an abundance of caution. At the time, of the more than 6,8 million people vaccinated with Johnson & Johnson’s jab in the United States, six had developed severe blood clots.

Still, fearmongering runs wild on social media, which is the second part of the bad news:

People who said they use social media as a trusted information source were significantly more resistant to getting a Covid-19 shot, as were people who identified Afrikaans as their home language.

Forty-two percent of Afrikaans home language respondents were vaccine hesitant.

A full 42% of Afrikaans home language speakers were unsure about getting the jab, which far outweighs hesitancy in other language groups.

This from TimesLIVE:

“The lowest hesitancy rates were found among Tshivenda, 18%, and isiNdebele, 19%, respondents, as well as isiXhosa, isiZulu, and Sepedi respondents, all 25%. While many of these language groups have overlapping confidence intervals [that is their estimates are not statistically significantly different], the difference between Sesotho, 35%, and five language groups is also significant.”

Of the 71% who said they were willing to take the vaccine, 55% chose “strongly agree” and 16% chose “somewhat agree”.

Of the 29% who said they were unwilling, 16% strongly disagreed, 8% somewhat disagreed, with the remaining adults surveyed saying they did not know if they would get the jab.

That’s not a huge percentage to win over, so we best hope the 16% who said they “somewhat agree” with getting the vaccine hold steady:

Among the 29% of respondents who were vaccine hesitant, the three leading reasons for their hesitancy were that they were worried about the side-effects (31%), did not believe it was effective (21%) or did not trust vaccines in general (18%).

I wonder how many of that 29% have a medical background, like the countless doctors and scientists who are working tirelessly against a tidal wave of misinformation.

Sorry, Doc, I trust this meme I saw on Facebook more than you.

As an aside, whilst South Africa’s official COVID-19 death toll stands at 54 968, a new report from the Medical Research Council (MRC) says the country has actually experienced one of the world’s worst death tolls relative to the size of our population.

That’s because our excess deaths stand in the 12 months leading up to May 8 top 157 000, many of which are likely due to COVID-19.

[sources:busday&timeslive]