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Michelle Dagnino, executive director of the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre in Toronto, told Global News vaccine uptake in the Jane and Finch neighbourhood has dropped off since the rollout began.
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With in-person schooling returning in Ontario Monday, Dagnino said she’s seen vaccine uptake increase, but not by a dramatic jump.
Dagnino agrees with Smart that the messaging around vaccination for kids hasn’t been clear.
“From the beginning, parents needed to hear, ‘This is very safe, this is the best way to protect your children and your families and this is the best way to protect your communities,’” she said.
“What we’ve heard a lot has been some uncertainty about whether we should be waiting to get more information about the vaccines, whether it is sort of the best option for the entirety of that age range (or) maybe it’s better for kids who are a little bit older … and it hasn’t been very easy to access either.”
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Vaccine access is also key to increasing vaccination rate among that age group, said Smart, who is also a pediatrician in Whitehorse, Yukon.
“We need to make sure vaccines are accessible, that (it’s) easy for parents to get their child to the vaccine clinic. This is where we’re hearing ideas like school-based clinics, evening clinics (and) weekend clinics,” she said, adding officials should be looking at data to better understand how to get more kids inoculated.
“Do we need to target certain groups with more information? Those are some of the strategies that we really need to consider.”
In terms of communication, misinformation isn’t helping either, Smart added.
“That’s why conversations like this are so important, so that parents can hear from health-care professionals, particularly us in pediatrics … We know a lot about the health of children, and when you hear pediatricians strongly recommending a vaccine, it’s because we really believe that it will be helpful,” she said.
In October, Dr. Ran Goldman, a professor in the department of pediatrics at the University of British Columbia, led a study on the willingness of parents to get their kids vaccinated against the virus.
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The research, which involved a pair of surveys of 2,800 parents, the majority of whom were Canadian, offered varying results.
During the peak of the pandemic between March and May 2020, 65 per cent of parents with kids under 12 said they would get them vaccinated.
Those results were compared with a second survey between December 2020 and March 2021, after a vaccine for adults was approved. Then, less than 60 per cent of parents responded saying they would be willing to have their kids vaccinated.
“We were surprised,” Goldman recently told The Canadian Press, adding some parents believed that getting vaccinated themselves was fine, but too risky for their kids.
“We need to work with parents to understand the importance and the safety of vaccines for children specifically.”
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Dr. Stephen Freedman, a COVID-19 researcher and pediatric emergency medicine physician at the Alberta Children’s Hospital, told Global News that the majority of children should get the vaccine to protect their vulnerable family members and loved ones.
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“The unvaccinated population is taking up a disproportionate amount of hospital beds, and … even vaccinated adults can get quite sick with Omicron,” he said.
“We would not want our … children coming home with Omicron and then giving it to a parent who then ends up in hospital even though they’re vaccinated, so we still want to minimize the spread as much as possible to protect our population.”
Looking ahead, Smart hopes more children will get vaccinated.
“We have immunized millions of children now (aged) five to 11 with this vaccine, it’s been proven to be very safe and it’s proving to be effective in terms of preventing hospitalizations and post-COVID complications like MIS-C and long-COVID,” she said.
“I would strongly encourage all parents to have their children vaccinated against COVID-19. It’s safe, it’s effective, and it’s by far the best tool we have in our toolbox at this time.”
— with files from Jamie Mauracher, Reuters and The Canadian Press
© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
