New research into vaccine hesitancy has found New Zealanders' biggest concern is severe adverse effects, followed by how effective a vaccine is and how long its protection will last.
The researchers from Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland were prompted by low vaccination rates in Aotearoa post Covid-19, raising fears of deadly outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, like measles.
It comes as 6084 new Covid cases were reported in the last week, according to the latest data from Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora.
Lead investigator associate professor Amy Chan says vaccine hesitancy remains one of the top 10 public health threats identified by the World Health Organization.
"Identifying Kiwis’ priorities for vaccine information will help health professionals and policymakers provide the information they feel they need to weigh up decisions about vaccinating themselves or their tamariki."
She said earlier research showed that providing people with the information they felt they needed was a useful public health tool.
"The researchers explored the preferences of more than 600 New Zealanders using an online survey that took them through a series of decisions about vaccines by indicating what information would most influence their choices.
"For example, the vaccine could provide longer protection but only be available in hospitals versus shorter protection and widely available in the community."
Chan said overall, people most valued information about adverse effects and how much protection vaccines offered for how long.
"Vaccine origin and route of administration were least important.
"This differed slightly for people who tended to subscribe to conspiracy theories about vaccines. They wanted to know how long the vaccine had taken to develop and how many doses were required and were less concerned about effectiveness."
Health providers should provide information to vaccine-hesitant people about how long the vaccine had taken to develop, and the total number of doses required, Chan added.
Rare side effects of vaccine
Yesterday, it was reported two new but extremely rare Covid-19 vaccine side effects have been detected by researchers.
The study involved more than 99 million people from several countries including New Zealand.
Researchers confirmed how rare known vaccine complications are, with researchers stating the benefits of Covid-19 vaccines still “vastly outweigh risks”.
Anonymous electronic healthcare data was used to compare the rates of 13 brain, blood and heart conditions in people who received either the Pfizer, Moderna or AstraZeneca jabs with the rate that would be expected in the population pre-pandemic.
It proved known links between mRNA (Pfizer and Moderna) vaccines and the rare side-effects of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (swelling of the thin sac covering the heart).
It also confirmed that Guillain-Barre syndrome (where the immune system attacks nerves) and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (a type of brain blood clot) were rare side effects linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine.
But two rare new side effects were also identified in the data analysis linked to AstraZeneca vaccine.
Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (inflammation and swelling in the brain and spinal cord) and transvere myelitis (spinal cord inflammation) were both detected by the study.
The findings were published in the international journal Vaccine on Friday.
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