Vaccines against COVID-19: The need to communicate health issues well

The pandemic allowed a large part of the population to become more familiar with scientific work. We begin to learn new terms, to understand processes, to understand – in broad terms – how science works. However, it seems that leaving the pandemic behind has made it difficult for us to also leave behind everything we have learned. But not only to citizens, but to everyone in general.

A clear example of this has been the recent scandal, after it became known that a large part of the bivalent vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 in the country have an extension of use date. What’s that? A common mechanism for this type of substance, based on studies and evidence, by which it is decided to extend the useful life of the medication, as long as the conditions that ensure its safety, quality and effectiveness are maintained.

Obviously, it is a complex situation: a season with rising cases of COVID-19, a population that wants to catch up on its vaccines, and all of this crashes into reasonable doubts after learning that the medication to be received has an expiration date. already reached.

Unfortunately, This is an issue that health authorities have not known how to handle.

First, the Vice Minister of Health Ricardo Peña and, then, the head of the sector himself, César Vásquez, appeared in recent days in various media to try to explain the issue and calm a population that was already doubting about the usefulness of the main tool that has helped overcome the pandemic: vaccines.

From not knowing how to clearly explain the extension of use process in vaccines until appearing without a unified strategy to remove the “defeated” in these substances, have been the communication problems that have been easiest to identify from the official voices of the Minsa.

But that’s not the only problem, but also the lack of transparency. When the questions began, it was pointed out that everything was provided for in a ministerial resolution signed in September of last year and in an authorization from the Digemid of October 2023. And if everything was in order, why was it not communicated in a timely manner? Why did he wait until a person asked for the expiration date on the vial containing his vaccine dose?

And if we add to all this very generic answers When you question whether the bivalent vaccines are equally effective against the new variant of SARS-CoV-2, or if you wonder when the new updated monovalent vaccines will arrive, the only thing that appears is uncertainty.

“Perhaps there has been a lack of disseminating and communicating better to the population, and has generated this misinformation that, be careful, if we do not manage it well, it can be more lethal than the virus itself,” Minister Vásquez himself pointed out in dialogue with radio Exitosa.

We are in a moment of transition. COVID-19 is becoming an endemic disease that we must learn to live with. But we are no longer in a pandemic and we cannot react as we did then. In this process, authorities like the Minsa should be guides to help us get through this moment: with transparency and with good and timely information. But as long as they insist on keeping themselves (and us) in the dark, we will continue to stumble over the same stone.