First of all, we needed much better communication out there. Communication experts know what they're doing, but they have to know the science behind it to know what it is they need to be doing. That's the general communication or the media communication.
I think your comments are really important. You have to listen to what the concerns are. You then need to find out what they know and what they don't know at the individual level. You need to see if you can offer them some information that might be helpful when you're trying to build this kind of trust. You need to find out if they understand and have more questions about what you've told them. When you do this, many of these people can move from being vaccine hesitant or resistant to saying, “Yes, I will accept it”, when it's done one-on-one like that.
It's called “mini motivational interviewing”. We've done national studies with this in Canada for routine immunization. It can be very successful. It is not expensive to do. We did not do it well during COVID. We needed many more health care providers who were trained in being able to do this, whether they were pharmacists, frontline nurses or family physicians. We needed many more people out there who could listen well and find out what the obstacles were.
For some of our indigenous populations, it was past history. For some people, it was what their local MP said. For some people, it was what their local MLA said. For some people, it was what their religious leader said. There were all kinds of people out there crowing that they knew what to do and told people what they thought they needed to do, not based on what the evidence was.