UK Health Minister Matt Hancock greeted Monday 1er February, an important step in the country’s ambitious vaccine deployment plan: “The anticoronavirus vaccine has now been offered to all English retirement homes. “ In addition, with an average of 500,000 injections per day, 9/10e of those over 80 and half of those over 70 have received at least one dose of the vaccine. Boris Johnson’s government is on track to achieve the goal of 100% of these age groups vaccinated by the end of February.
This drastic campaign is not without its difficulties, starting with the reluctance to vaccines among Britons of “BAME” (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) origin. At the beginning of January, the “UK Household Annual Study” (a study on the behavior of the British) pointed out that 72% of black people questioned (before the start of the vaccination campaign, on December 8, 2020) were hesitant, as were 42.3% British of Pakistani or Bangladeshi descent. A document from SAGE (the scientific committee advising the government) also underlined in January, in light of previous national vaccination campaigns, that “Vaccine adoption rates among BAMEs were 10% to 20% lower than among whites”.
This reluctance is all the more damaging as the pandemic has wreaked havoc among these populations, who are more likely to occupy “frontline” jobs. In November, the review The Lancet thus established, following the first pandemic wave, that black people were twice as likely to be infected with the virus (and Asians 1.5 times more) than white Britons.
“Context of institutional racism”
The employees – often precarious and poorly paid – of retirement homes are largely from BAME backgrounds, which would explain the fact that many of them refused to receive a dose of Pfizer-BioNTech or Oxford-AstraZeneca (both vaccines being deployed). “Some staff refuse the vaccine for cultural reasons”, Nadra Ahmed, president of the National Care Association, one of the largest retirement home unions, confirmed Monday to the BBC.
This reluctance is fueled online by recurring, but completely inaccurate, rumors about the presence of pigs in the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine or the supposed effect of Pfizer-BioNTech on human DNA. “This is due to a combination of factors, including the lack of messages [pédagogiques] in different languages or in different formats, points out Dr Sarah Ali, endocrinologist and member of the South Asian Health Foundation, an association promoting health in Asian communities. People are also wondering how quickly the vaccines have been deployed. We must explain to them that their safety has not been sacrificed at all, but that the administrative procedures have been shortened ”, adds the young woman, who has just posted on social networks a video reassuring her community, in Urdu.
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