“For us to have a successful effort and achieve around the 80% vaccinations that we need to achieve herd immunity, policymakers need a holistic perspective and to be ticking all the boxes across the 6-A perspective model.”
To some questions that arise from the economic effects of the pandemic like: how do companies deal with this vaccination effort, should employees be incentivised to take it, and what are the tools for persuading persons to take it, Robinson said:
“If you want your employees or the general population to take the vaccine, then understanding people’s reasons for hesitancy is extremely important. There seems to be a notion that because ‘people are dying and the economy is suffering, why don’t people go and get the vaccine and help us get back to normal’?”
“We know, from many years of behavioural science and behavioural economics, that human beings don’t make decisions that way. We need to be quite sophisticated and segment the population to understand that different groups have different concerns and different messages will work for different groups,” proposed Robinson, who is also head of the Department at Economics at UWI Cave Hill.