Sharing our experiences with the COVID-19 vaccine

Last week, I was one of many health workers who received their first doses of a vaccine against the coronavirus. It was not a pleasant experience — most encounters with needles are not — but it was survivable. Body aches, migraines, and malaise were the worst of my adverse effects. Friends on social media shared their own, some reporting fever episodes and feeling too unwell to report for work. Some were perfectly well after vaccination. My social media timeline has been filled with these stories and with photos of health professionals smiling behind their masks, arms bared, while receiving their injection. Adverse effects aside, social media posts are overwhelmingly positive because we are one step closer to the dream of widespread protection against the virus. In such a dream future of herd immunity, the infections will not be brought down to zero, but there is hope that numbers will be kept low enough that they won’t overwhelm hospitals and health care resources—something that happens fairly easily in a health care system as underfunded and unequal as ours.

The reason it has become important to overshare these personal experiences with the COVID-19 vaccines, so to speak, is to help combat the fear of vaccines that continues to linger in our country. A recent Octa Research Group survey revealed that as high as 46 percent of Filipinos are not willing to be vaccinated, and only 19 percent are. These are daunting numbers. I agree with a recent article by columnist Peter Wallace (“A massive PR campaign,” 3/11/21)—that there should be an intense media campaign to increase confidence in vaccinations using intelligent, appropriately funded strategies. I am also disappointingly aware that such advice will likely not be heeded, and that the informed lay person and the health professional play a big role in bringing those vaccination numbers up. In describing personal experiences with adverse effects in upbeat and balanced ways, we may yet encourage those who are vaccine-hesitant to lean toward inoculation.

As I have said in previous columns, and as many continue to say, it is not right that the government has passed on to us, the medical community and health workers, the burden of increasing public trust in vaccination. In the first place, there should have been loud, clear, and transparent steps to recuperate from the anti-vaccine sentiment that arose from the Dengvaxia controversy. It should not have been up to us, in Opinion columns and social media posts and our limited reach, to condemn that media circus as the cause for drops in the country’s vaccination programs and the outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases we saw in the last two years.

Moreover, there should have been transparency about the choice of vaccines and the utilization of government funds borrowed purportedly for vaccination. There is nuance here that could easily be lost to the public: It is true that the “best” vaccine is the one that is available; it is true that vaccines have become a precious commodity and we should be grateful to be inoculated. Yet it is also true that other options did exist, and that the process for choosing our current options was not transparent. It is also true that some sectors got vaccinated before those that should have been prioritized according to World Health Organization recommendations, further eroding public trust. These truths can coexist.

But all that nuance may as well be nothing when the average Filipino is faced with the option of whether or not to be vaccinated, and continues to run into conflicting information. Even doctors’ circles continue to be overrun with alarmist posts about links between certain vaccines and serious adverse events—links that range from tenuous, weak, to nonexistent. We have come to a point where we may be best served by simply encouraging as many people as possible to be vaccinated, in the shortest possible time. Even as vaccination rollouts continue, we have many obstacles ahead. Will the emergence of new variants erode the effectiveness of existing vaccines? How long will we really be able to remain immune? Given the pace of vaccine deliveries to the Philippines vis-à-vis our population, will it really take us several years before we can hope for herd immunity? Is herd immunity even possible, given this slow pace of inoculation and the fast-evolving nature of the virus? Will we ever encourage enough people to get vaccinated to the point that we can protect vulnerable populations effectively? It’s a race against time, and there are many stumbling blocks for us on the way. We must do our part to make the stumbling block of vaccine refusal smaller and smaller.

kchuarivera@gmail.com