15 July 2022

15 July 2022 – Mains Questions à Daily Questions & Model Answers

Q1. What do you understand by Vaccine hesitancy? discuss the consequences of it and also suggest some communication strategies to resolve this issue. (250 words)

• Paper & Topic: GS II àHealth & related Issues
• Model Answer:
• Introduction:
• Vaccine hesitancy is defined by the World Health Organization as a delay in accepting or refusing vaccines notwithstanding the availability of immunization services.
• Vaccine apprehension has been recorded in more than 90 percent of the world’s countries.

Body:

Vaccine Hesitancy Illustrations:

• In 2019, approximately 4, 24,000 children worldwide have been diagnosed with measles, compared to 1, 73,000 in 2018.
• In the early 2000s, underprivileged populations in Uttar Pradesh were reported to have taken five times the recommended dose of oral polio vaccine.

Vaccine Reluctance for a Variety of Reasons:

• Religious propaganda claims that the vaccination may contain microorganisms, chemicals, or animal-derived items, all of which are prohibited under religious law.
• The basis of vaccine hesitancy all across the world is the use of social media to instill fear in people by wrongly blaming vaccines for unrelated diseases.
• In India, for example, some people are refusing to get the polio vaccine.
• This is because it is widely believed that the polio vaccine causes disease, and infertility, and is useless.
• Diseases caused by vaccines: Oral Polio Vaccines (OPV) contain attenuated but live poliovirus. Immunized youngsters excrete the vaccination virus, which can spread from one person to another.
• This permits the virus to persist and mutate into a more virulent form, increasing the risk of poliovirus acquired from vaccines (VDPV).
• Inconvenient vaccination access is another major factor in vaccine apprehension.

Steps that can be made in India to overcome vaccination apprehension include:

• Vaccination as the default approach: Some governments have imposed restrictions on families that refuse to get vaccinated.
• For example, in France, 11 immunizations are required for children, and unvaccinated youngsters are not permitted to attend nurseries or schools.
• In Australia, parents who do not vaccinate their children are not eligible for the universal Family Allowance welfare payments.

Establishing trust: Vaccine manufacturers can provide up-to-date information on adverse effects as well as assurances regarding a reliable vaccine safety system.

• They can also include vaccination-related FAQs, such as answers to concerns about vaccine benefits, safety, and immunologic effects, as well as links to a variety of internet resources for doctors and parents.

Digital Algorithms: Users can request that Google, Facebook, and other similar platforms only provide them with reliable, science-based material regarding vaccines.

Misinformation must be addressed: According to a 2018 study, inadequate awareness was the primary reason for 45 percent of youngsters missing various immunizations in 121 Indian districts with high un-immunization rates.

• While 24 percent of people did not get inoculated because they were afraid of side effects, 11 percent were hesitant to get immunized for reasons other than fear of side effects.
• A powerful person or celebrity should come up to debunk the beliefs that lead to vaccine apprehension.

STRATEGIES FOR COMMUNICATION:

• Use of persuasion – through role model advertising,
• Mass awareness generation
• Using credible and expert sources to raise awareness; using incentives to increase vaccination campaigns.

Conclusion:

• Vaccine apprehension jeopardizes decades of progress in decreasing the burden of infectious diseases that have afflicted humanity for generations.
• Myths and disinformation about vaccination will be addressed through a coordinated effort between pediatricians, family doctors, parents, public health officials, governments, the technology industry, and civil society.

Q2. Explain in what ways behavioral sciences can be used in the prevention and management of COVID-19. (250 words)  

• Paper & Topic: GS II àHealth & related Issues
• Model Answer:
• Introduction:
• It is now widely accepted that huge groups of people act as super-spreaders for the fatal coronavirus.
• Despite this, there have been numerous mass meetings in recent years due to religious and political concerns.
• For example, there was footage of ladies performing Jalabhishek at Navapura village in Gujarat’s Sanand during a Kalash yatra.
• In addition, under police protection, the Mahakumbh was held in Haridwar, when millions of people took a holy dip in the Ganga.
• Daily new infections are caused by a lack of physical separation and sufficient hand washing.
• The most important cause for the increase is that people are wearing masks inappropriately, or not at all.
• According to data from the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs’ global study of COVID-19 knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP), India saw a 5% decrease in mask use from July 2020 to March 2021.
• In this context, because the Covid-19 issue necessitates large-scale behavior modification and places enormous psychological pressures on individuals, social and behavioral sciences insights into the pandemic response are useful.

Body:

Pandemic Behavioural Dimensions:

Threat:

• Fear is one of the most common emotional responses during a pandemic.
• Humans, like other animals, have a variety of defense mechanisms for dealing with environmental hazards.
• Threat-related negative emotions can be contagious, and fear can make dangers seem more imminent.

Optimism Bias:

• There is a widespread belief that unpleasant things happen to other people more often than they happen to you.
• While optimism bias might help people avoid negative emotions, it can also cause them to underestimate their chances of developing a disease and, as a result, to disregard public health warnings.

Prejudice and Discrimination:

• People’s reactions to fear and threat affect not just how they think about themselves, but also how they feel about and react to others, particularly out-groups.
• Threats of sickness, for example, are frequently linked to higher degrees of ethnocentrism and intolerance toward out-groups.
• This can lead to a loss of empathy for persons who are socially isolated and an increase in dehumanization.

Disaster and ‘Panic’:

• It’s a popular assumption in popular culture that people panic when they’re in danger, especially when they’re in a crowd.
• That is, they act rashly and excessively for self-preservation, putting everyone’s survival in jeopardy.
• This concept has been used to explain how people have reacted to the current Covid-19 outbreak, most notably in reference to the concept of ‘panic buying.’

Social Norms:

• Social norms influence people’s behavior by influencing what they feel others are doing or what they believe others approve or disapprove of.

Inequality in Access to Resources:

• Inequalities in access to resources affect not just who is in danger of infection, developing symptoms, or succumbing to the disease, but also who is able to follow suggestions to slow the disease’s spread.

Fake news and misinformation:

• On social media, fake news and misinformation regarding Covid-19 have spread widely, with potentially deadly effects.
• Next Steps during pandemics, significant behavioral changes are required to slow virus spread.

In this instance:

Messages to the Public:

• Public messages supporting good (for example, health-promoting) norms might be used to change behavior by correcting such misperceptions.
• Additionally, communication tactics must strike a balance between overcoming optimism bias and causing excessive worry and dread.

Nudge Theory:

• Another strategy to exploit the impact of norms is to use ‘nudges,’ which change people’s decision architecture to affect their behavior.
• ‘The great majority of individuals in your town believe that everyone should stay at home,’ for example, a message with persuasive social norms might say.

Countering Fake News:

• Fighting disinformation necessitates a proactive approach that includes subtle hints that encourage people to think about accuracy.
• For instance, ask users to score the correctness of randomly selected postings on a regular basis.
• As has been discovered for crowd ratings of source trustworthiness, the crowdsourced accuracy ratings created by this approach may also be beneficial for discovering disinformation.

Persuasion:

• Several communications tactics, such as stressing the recipient’s benefits or focusing on protecting others, may be helpful.
• ‘Wash your hands to protect your parents and grandparents,’ for example.
• Communication that is aligned with the recipient’s moral beliefs, or that appeals to societal consensus or scientific norms, may also be beneficial.

Leadership:

• Emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic provide opportunities for leadership at all levels, including families, workplaces, local communities, and nations. Individuals can be coordinated by leadership, and they can be guided away from behaviours that are no longer deemed socially responsible.

Conclusion:

• “Health communication is regarded to have relevance for practically every area of health and well-being, including illness prevention, health promotion, and quality of life,” according to a recent World Health Organization report.
• To prevent the potentially fatal impacts of COVID-19, immediate intervention is required, which can be supported by behavioural and social sciences.