7 reasons people are rejecting COVID-19 vaccines

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COVID-19 Healthy Living

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COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy: 7 reasons people are still rejecting COVID-19 vaccines

There are pieces of evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are saving lives.

There have been claims and shreds of evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are saving lives. Recent statistics from the UK  in a study showed that nearly every single participant among the 200,000 people tracked had developed antibodies against the virus within two weeks of their second dose analyses suggest that both the AstraZeneca and the Pfizer-BioNTech jabs reduce hospitalization rates by 92-96% against the Delta variant cases.

These haven’t gone down well with some people, including health professionals, about vaccine hesitancy, who are still rejecting the shots, many of whom have protested on different occasions in the US, UK, France, and Greece.

Theories of staunch anti-vaxxers (anti-vaccine movement campaigners) notwithstanding, Here are the reasons why people are COVID-19 vaccine-hesitant and are saying ‘No’ to it.

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1. Safety and efficacy concerns

The COVID-19 vaccines are not yet fully approved for commercial use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

even though WHO has issued public health emergency use of several vaccines based on data from clinical trials that included tens of thousands of participants. Still, the condensed timeline in which the vaccines were developed and received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) has raised safety and efficacy concerns for people who have ‘vaccine hesitancy’ beliefs.

2. Long-term COVID-19 vaccines side effects of health

Some people don’t want to take the COVID-19 vaccines because of the long-term negative (side) health effects which they perceive riskier than the vaccine itself.

Despite the mild short-term COVID-19 side effects that occur within two days of vaccination, the long-term side effect — myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle — has been reported in people receiving Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. According to the University of Alabama, Birmingham, the negative effect is about one in a million or possibly higher rates in some populations, but no one wants to be a victim of vaccine inefficacy.

The majority of Americans who have not been vaccinated — or who say they are hesitant about vaccinating their children — report that safety is their main concern and they said they wanted to confirm the vaccine was safe or to see how the vaccine is working before getting the shot.

The short-term side effects seen in these studies, and again in the nationwide rollouts that began in December 2020, were tolerability issues, according to the University of Alabama mainly arm pain, fatigue, and headache.

3. Preference for physiological immunity

Another reason for vaccine hesitancy is the preference for herd immunity. Herd immunity can be achieved through vaccination or via previous infections when one develops sufficient antibodies against the virus, which eventually lead to natural or physiological immunity.

Some health workers in the US, Canada, Israel communities have expressed a preference for physiologic immunity, rather than obtaining immunity through vaccination. These individuals perceive the risk of vaccination to be greater than the risk of infection.

4. Lack of trust in health professionals and organizations and government

A key factor in COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and rejection of a new vaccine is the lack of trust in health professionals and organizations and the government. So many people that the health professionals through government support were too quick to develop the vaccine for the purpose of amassing wealth and for political gain and the vaccine producers competed among themselves to know which takes the first position in launching the product in the market ahead of others without proper and timely scientific researches.

Confidence: the person’s trust in the vaccines efficacy and safety, the health services offering them, and the policymakers deciding on their rollout https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210720-the-complexities-of-vaccine-hesitancy

5. Religious and moral beliefs and conspiracy theories against COVID-19 vaccines

Some Christians believe that the COVID-19 pandemic is linked to the New World Order (NWO) or One-World Government, which they believe will usher in the era of the soon-coming antichrist – a sign of the end of the world. They also believe that taking the vaccine to tantamount to accepting the Mark of the Beast as revealed in the Book of the Revelation in the Holy Bible.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has judged that it morally unacceptable to receive Covid-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process, after claiming that some vaccines were produced from  abortion-derived cell lines

There are other theories (popularly referred to as conspiracy theories) that have been circulated over the media, especially social media with claims that that novel coronavirus was intentionally created by the government or that health organizations have exaggerated COVID-19’s lethality for pharmaceutical and political gain as such, through global governance, surveillance, and technology bring about the introduction of the Mark of the Beast and the emergence of Anti-Christ.

The suspicion of a sinister conspiracy behind the development of a coronavirus vaccine has been spurred on by a comment from Bill Gates on March 18. As part of a Reddit forum, Gates noted that in the future “digital certificates” could trace who had recently been tested or who had received a vaccine (when one is developed) making it possible for a business to resume as usual.

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6. The widespread belief that COVID-19 was created as a biotech weapon

The widespread belief, including WHO and national governments that appears to be one of the scientific-based reasons, is one that wouldn’t go away so soon as many vaccine-hesitant still maintain that was not as a result of a natural disaster but created by humans as a biotech weapon to inflict harm on others. Such was fuelled by the theory and belief that the 5G, fifth-generation wireless mobile technology network, exacerbates the spread of the disease.

President Joe Biden ordered aides to find answers to the origin of the virus that causes COVID-19, saying on Wednesday that U.S. intelligence agencies are pursuing rival theories potentially including the possibility of a laboratory accident in China.

When former US President Donald Trump talked about the possibility that the pandemic was hatched in a lab in Wuhan, it was generally dismissed as a conspiracy theory tinged with racism. Now his successor, President Joe Biden,  is asking his intelligence agencies to look into it seriously.

7. Autonomy and Right to personal freedom

A report has it that a sense of autonomy and right to personal freedom informs the attitudes of certain people including health care workers toward the COVID-19 vaccines, preferring to make their own choices about it even though Clinicians are held to the standard of informed consent when recommending treatments to their patients.

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