Prominent doctors say the federal government needs to ramp up its communication tactics regarding the coronavirus vaccine – and that public trust hinges on how they go about it.
“You can have the best vaccine on the planet, but if nobody wants it, it’s useless. So at the end of the day, you need to get people to see the benefit,” said Dr. Gary Kobinger, who previously served on the federal vaccine task force before stepping down due to concerns about their levels of transparency.
Kobinger says the government has since taken steps to be extremely transparent with respect to any potential conflicts of interest among task force members, which was his chief concern at the time he stepped down.
But now, he’s pushing for the government to step up its efforts in another area: its strategy for communicating the necessity and safety of vaccines to the public.
“The most important goal is to keep, and increase, trust of the population into the processes, into the decisions that are being made that concern their health and their life.”
Kobinger explained that government bureaucracy can weigh down efforts to be transparent. And at a time when public confidence in a vaccine is essential, he said the government should consider taking innovative steps to be as transparent as possible – even going so far as to suggest the feds set up an independent body tasked with transparency.
“But what it will create is a point of contact where people can go to, and this information is only sitting on solid science, not on the next election,” Kobinger said.
He said this independent communications body could be made up of virologists, immunologists, psychologists, economists and journalists that would be able to engage with the public and answer their questions.
While the government hasn’t given any indication of whether it intends to explore these kinds of innovative options, it has been holding regular press conferences to communicate the latest coronavirus news.
The government has taken to providing weekly briefings with officials from Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada, alongside federal ministers, to break down developments with Canada’s vaccine rollout and coronavirus response. Sometimes ministers address the public multiple times a week – and the prime minister usually attends one of these briefings.
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While these press conferences are generally livestreamed on media platforms and give reporters the nuggets of news that they then break down for a general audience through their reporting, one infectious disease specialist, Dr. Isaac Bogoch, echoed Kobinger’s call for vaccine transparency.
“You really have to inform people on what these vaccines are, what they can expect and how this plan is going to be rolled out. Just total transparency. And I think it’s important to know that we don’t have all the answers, and that’s OK to say,” Bogoch told Global News in an interview.
He added that it’s important to translate this information into formats that allow Canadians who speak different languages or fall into a younger age group, to grasp the sometimes complex science underlying the vaccine effort.
“You also need meaningful community engagement, especially for communities, for example, that are disproportionately impacted by the virus.”
Bogoch also noted that history has left behind a legacy of shattered trust between some communities and Canada’s health-care systems, citing unethical experiments by the government in the 1940s on Indigenous children without consent – depriving malnourished kids of proper nutrition to see what the impacts would be.
These kinds of atrocities contribute to lasting mistrusts, Bogoch said, that need to be addressed. The gravity of securing this trust is underscored in the present pandemic context, he added.
“This is extremely important, to build trust between communities and the health-care system in communities and the government, and I’m not going to pretend that that can occur overnight – that’s just not going to happen,” Bogoch said.
For its part, the government has said that while the communications component is important, there are also some tidbits of information that must be withheld. For example, INTERPOL has warned that nefarious actors may be plotting to disrupt the cold chain for vaccine storage around the world. As a result, federal and provincial governments have been keeping mum when it comes to sharing overly specific details on vaccine dose storage and delivery routes.
Kobinger said the government should be fine to keep these sorts of details to themselves amid a broader push for increased transparency.
“I do believe that there is some information that is not so important,” he said.
“We have seen it, by the way, people trying to encode ransomware into a freezer program so that they were going to get money – saying that they will inactivate the freezer, for example, from a distance.”
While this blackmail attempt didn’t occur in Canada, Kobinger said that threats like these are a real risk within Canada’s border as well – and provide a justification for opaqueness in select, specific areas what it comes to coronavirus vaccine communications.
The government, meanwhile, defended its vaccine-related transparency efforts on Monday.
“We do hold technical briefings every week where Health Canada officials are present, where procurement officials are present and where PHAC officials are present in an effort to provide as much information to the Canadian public that they may seek or want in order to have as much information as possible about the vaccines,” Procurement Minister Anita Anand told reporters on Monday.
“In addition I heard various efforts among cultural groups and various communities that are speaking directly with their communities, in particular, the South Asian community, to ensure that vaccines are safe and effective once approved by Health Canada.”
She added that there is an “across government approach” to provide Canadians with information that will ensure they are “comfortable with approved vaccines, that are safe and effective.”
Canada’s first coronavirus vaccine has already begun to be rolled out in Canadian communities, and thousands more doses of this Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine are slated to arrive on a regular basis. However, the approval is just over a week old – a reality that also gives Bogoch hope for the continued communication effort.
“In all fairness, though, it’s been five minutes — give it a few minutes here,” Bogoch said.
“You can be sure that at the federal level and at the provincial level, they’re putting together a ton of documents in real-time that can be translated into any different language … of course, these programs should have started a while ago, but I think we’re going to see them start now. So I get that people want this, and it’s extremely important. It’s coming.”
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