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As he has done in numerous media conferences over the past 18 months, Dr. Saqib Shahab on Thursday urged Saskatchewan residents to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
But Saskatchewan’s chief medical health officer went one step further while talking about vaccination rates in the province.
“It is surprising to meet young people who work frontline in restaurants and retail who are fully vaccinated but they say their parents or grandparents are not because they’ve seen something on social media or someone has told them something,” Shahah said during a media conference at which the province announced measures to fight the fourth wave of COVID.
“I found that astounding. For a country that’s highly developed, science-based (and) technologically advanced, I find such attitudes surprising. Anyone who is deep into misinformation needs to course-correct themselves or be helped by friends and families and their children to course-correct.”
As of Thursday, more than 1.5 million doses of COVID vaccine have been administered in Saskatchewan and more than 712,000 people are considered fully vaccinated.
About 78 per cent of Saskatchewan residents who are eligible to get immunized against COVID have done so and 70 per cent of those 12 and over have got two shots.
But the uptake is low in younger age groups, especially when it comes to second doses. Only 56 per cent of those eligible in the 30-to-39 age group are fully vaccinated, along with 57 per cent of those in the 20-to-29 age group and 61 per cent of those in the 40-to-49 category.
Children under the age of 12 currently aren’t eligible to get COVID vaccinations and the province has reported more than 300 cases in that age group over the past three days.
But Shahab noted that 98 per cent of Saskatchewan children who have tested positive are from households where their parents aren’t vaccinated.
Once COVID vaccines are approved for those under the age of 12, Shahab expects the province’s total vaccination rate to improve. But he still can’t understand vaccine hesitancy.
He previously has suggested that people in rural areas may have been reluctant to get vaccinated because they didn’t see a lot of COVID cases in their region, and that young people may have decided not to get their shots because they’re healthy.
He credited the Saskatchewan Health Authority for trying to address vaccine hesitancy with all of the methods of delivery it offered. And yet some people didn’t get vaccinated — and they now represent the majority of daily cases.
On Thursday, for example, 347 of the 439 new cases were people who hadn’t received one dose.
“I would just question all of us that why, with the worst pandemic we’ve seen in 100 years, vaccine uptake is so low,” Shahab said.
“Many other parts of the world are still waiting for their vaccines. They’re pleading, ‘Don’t give boosters. Give us first doses, second doses (for) our elderly (and) our health-care workers.’ And here we have a third of the population mired in conspiracy theories.”
