To­ba­go Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty of­fi­cials say mis­in­for­ma­tion is con­tribut­ing to vac­cine hes­i­tan­cy in To­ba­go. And the en­tire is­sue is now po­lar­is­ing To­bag­o­ni­ans.

Speak­ing as the TRHA rolled out its vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme in the vil­lages of Cas­tara and L’Anse Four­mi, Dr An­tho­ny Thomp­son said mis­in­for­ma­tion has left some To­bag­o­ni­ans with con­cerns about tak­ing the vac­cine.

“What you find is a lot of peo­ple have been re­cip­i­ents of in­for­ma­tion that has them deeply con­cerned. One of the things we have to grap­ple with is that we all con­sume in­for­ma­tion in dif­fer­ent ways. It’s not just the for­mal me­dia we are get­ting in­for­ma­tion from; long-time when we all used to read the same news­pa­per, we all agreed what the news was. Nowa­days, we all get news from a dif­fer­ent source and it’s open to in­ter­pre­ta­tion and a lot of times, we may not have the help to put it in­to con­text and it be­comes dis­tort­ed.”

He said the top­ic of COVID-19 vac­cines has al­so be­come a po­lar­is­ing is­sue. He said peo­ple are re­frain­ing from talk­ing about vac­cines as much as they refuse to speak about re­li­gion and pol­i­tics.

Thomp­son said, “That is an odd thing, a health­care is­sue locked in with re­li­gion and pol­i­tics. The lev­el of dis­com­fort peo­ple have dis­cussing whether they are vac­ci­nat­ed. When things get so po­larised, no mat­ter what in­for­ma­tion you put out there, if I am on the op­pos­ing side, if I am in the out-group, I don’t want to hear it and I think we need to shift the con­ver­sa­tion a bit. We have elec­tions all the time and we nev­er get that type of dishar­mo­ny.”

He said the first step to over­come hes­i­tan­cy is to lis­ten to the con­cerns of the peo­ple first-hand. He said the vac­cines can of­fer some lev­el of pro­tec­tion from the emerg­ing vari­ants.

Mean­while, Thomp­son al­so said more men in com­mu­ni­ties like Cas­tara were tak­ing the vac­cines when com­pared to women.

“It good to come out in the com­mu­ni­ty and see men com­ing for­ward to get their vac­cine.”

He said the Sinopharm and Pfiz­er vac­cines are pop­u­lar.

All­win Keer, a res­i­dent of L’anse Four­mi, said he took the Sinopharm vac­cine af­ter con­sult­ing the nurse. He said he suf­fered from a hip in­jury and ini­tial­ly spoke with his doc­tor on how the vac­cine would af­fect his in­jury.

He added that five of his six chil­dren were al­so vac­ci­nat­ed.

Kerr al­so ad­mit­ted that cit­i­zens are lis­ten­ing to “too much out­side in­for­ma­tion.”

“It have peo­ple who like to lis­ten to what oth­er peo­ple say. They lis­ten­ing to this out­side news from Ja­maica and want to fol­low that mood but I don’t think it right to do that. I think you could read for your­self and un­der­stand,” Kerr said.

He called on his fel­low To­bag­o­ni­ans to take the COVID-19 vac­cine.