N.S. needs to remove barriers to COVID-19 vaccination, health care advocate says

HALIFAX -

The push to get Nova Scotians vaccinated continues but the amount of vaccine going into arms across the province is slowing down.

"It's kind of the same thing that we saw at the tail end of the push to get the first doses out the door is that you do eventually just run out of people who are very eager to go get their second dose," said epidemiologist Kevin Wilson.

"The initial wave of the vaccine rollout was really effective and it reached the people who wanted to get vaccines and had few barriers and it did it really quickly," said Chris Parsons, with the Nova Scotia Health Coalition. "What we're seeing now is that the people who have real barriers in place are not either getting their second dose or they're not getting their first dose." 

As of Wednesday, 1,403,617 doses of vaccine had been administered in Nova Scotia, 657,205 of them were second doses.

In order for the province to move into the final phase of its reopening plan and remove more pandemic restrictions, 75 per cent of the population needs to be fully vaccinated. As of Monday, there were approximately 26,000 appointments booked after Sept. 1 that could be moved up into August.

"We really should be seeing Public Health culling through all those people who have not gotten a second dose and figuring out what those barriers are, are they transportation barriers, are they information barriers, is it simply the fact that they don't know they can move it up," said Parsons.

With the new school year fast approaching, a letter from the province's top doctor was shared yesterday online.

In the letter, Dr. Robert Strang strongly encouraged parents with children 12 and over who haven't yet had their first or second dose of vaccine to make an appointment, saying: "We all need two doses of the vaccine to be fully protected and it takes two weeks after your second dose to have full immunity."

According to data from the Nova Scotia government, as of Aug. 6, 20 per cent of youth aged 12 to 14 have had one shot of vaccine, while 59 have had both doses.

Meantime, 15 per cent of those aged 15 to 19 are partially vaccinated with one dose of vaccine and 57 per cent are fully vaccinated.

"There has been concern expressed by Public Health about the slow uptake in the 12 to 18 age group. There's still a significant number of children in that age bracket that have not been vaccinated that can be vaccinated," said Paul Wozney, president of the Nova Scotia Teachers Union. "So that means that well over half the student population in Nova Scotia is heading back to class in a few weeks without vaccine."

In New Brunswick, health officials are asking parents and guardians to ensure children 12 and older get vaccinations. On Thursday, the province said more than 11,000 New Brunswickers between the ages of 12 and 19 are not yet fully vaccinated and another roughly 19,000 have yet to receive their first doses.

Back in Nova Scotia, while the province continues its vaccine rollout, Parsons says there still hasn't been a robust campaign to fight vaccine hesitancy in Nova Scotia.

"I do think that some of the things that have happened, the fact that we are doing vaccine mixing, which many countries are not, the fact that there was very contradictory information and guidance about AstraZeneca that these things have led people that otherwise might not be hesitant to get the vaccine to think twice," said Parsons.