Vaccine hesitancy may be a waiting game. Even those who said they would never get the COVID-19 vaccine if it were available immediately became more likely to do so when it was available in the future.
If you or your child test positive for COVID, you clearly can’t go to that vaccination or booster appointment you had booked this week. So, when can you go?
We’re reliant on overseas supply - and the many moving parts of delivery. Each of those parts require staff on the ground – and many workers in this system are likely being affected by Omicron.
Instead of assuming that science skeptics are motivated by ignorance, or selfishness, we should listen to them and try to understand and address their actual concerns.
Through lockdowns, vaccine mandates and the spectre of mass death, the pandemic has uprooted our lives and challenged us to think differently about ethics. What might the future hold?
Vaccines and medical treatments can only go so far in an unequal society. Facing the ongoing history of racial discrimination and bias in the US would help end the pandemic.
We have moved beyond burning witches and lynching wrong-doers. So we should also stop shaming unvaccinated people. There are better ways to change behaviour.
In places with low vaccination rates, COVID-19 has the chance to linger, and variants develop and travel. Without global vaccine equity, this entirely predictable pattern will repeat itself.
Vaccine hesitancy poses significant risks for those refusing to be vaccinated. The more people get vaccinated, the better the chances of living with the virus.
A vaccine manufacturing facility will be built in Victoria to produce mRNA vaccines under an in-principle agreement between the federal government, the state government and global mRNA company Moderna
The new omicron variant of coronavirus has a number of mutations that may require manufacturers to update vaccines. The unique attributes of mRNA vaccines make updating them fast and easy.
The new variant is a warning: unless we take urgent action to correct global vaccine inequities, we risk the emergence of further variants, some of which may evade vaccines.
A recent lab-stage study finds that preexposure to the proteins used to treat conditions like hemophilia A could help train the immune system to tolerate rather than attack therapies.
Dean Faculty of Health Sciences and Professor of Vaccinology at University of the Witwatersrand; and Director of the SAMRC Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand