Managing through the Covid second wave: Public affairs and the challenge of Covid vaccination

• Published date: 01 February 2021
• Author: Phil Harris,Danny Moss
• Date: 01 February 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2642

EDITORIAL

Managing through the Covid second wave: Public affairs

and the challenge of Covid vaccination

As we are about to publish this first issue of the Journal Public Affairs

(JPA) in 2021, we do so against the backdrop of the still rising second

wave of coronavirus infection in the United Kingdom and in other

parts of the world. According to WHO figures, at time of writing,

there were just over 94 million cases of coronavirus recorded globally

with just over 2 million deaths. The major concern worldwide has

been the emergence of new more virulent strains of the coronavirus

that have contributed to a very serious second wave of infections in

many countries. Indeed, it was reported recently that coronavirus has

accounted for the highest total of daily deaths in the United Kingdom

since the Second World War (100,000). The chief concern in the

United Kingdom (and similarly elsewhere) is that the Public Health

Services (National Health Service in the United Kingdom) faces the

real threat that it could be overwhelmed by the number of Covid-

related admissions to hospital, which have reached a critical stage in

many regions with a new coronavirus patient being admitted to hospi-

tal every 30 s. As a consequence, a further national lockdown has

been imposed across the United Kingdom to try to stem the rising tide

of infection while a national vaccination programme is being rolled

out on a tiered basis starting with the most vulnerable groups of care

home residents, caring staff and NHS workers. Indeed, the target of

vaccinating all people in vulnerable groups by mid-February may well

be on the cards with the NHS delivering over 1.5 million doses of vac-

cine a day. Similar lockdowns, curfews and border closures are

increasingly evident around the world as internationally and at a state

and regional level, we grapple with controlling the pandemic.

Indeed, coronavirus vaccine strategy adopted arguably has

become a critically important public affairs issue for government

around the world. Here, the key issue is the credibility and perceived

competence of the government's strategies for securing sufficient

vaccines, managing the vaccine's distribution and convincing some

sceptical anti-vaccination groups to recognise the vaccines' safety and

efficacy.

In the United Kingdom, the government's crucial decision has

been to prioritise administering the first doses of the vaccine to reach

out to a more significant proportion of the population before topping

up individual's immunity with a second dose. This calculated risk and

rollout has been widely explained and promoted using pubic

healthcare and NHS experts to endorse the policy and encourage pos-

itive debate in the media.

In the United States, African American and Hispanics/Latin Amer-

icans have disproportionately lost their jobs in the Covid recession,

but they are also more likely to perform the kinds of labour deemed

essential, which accounts, in part, for the higher infection,

hospitalisation and death rates found among these populations. What

is difficult to understand fully is that even though African-Americans

are more likely than white Americans to be infected with –and die

from –the virus; recent surveys have found that only around 42% of

African-Americans have expressed a willingness to receive the vac-

cine. Indeed, the inauguration of the new Biden Presidency was mar-

ked with the sombre recognition that over 25 million cases of Covid

had been reported and deaths from the virus had reached over

400,000 in the United States again more than had died during the

Second World War. The new President made the immediate commit-

ment to tackle the pandemic more aggressively. This will involve

addressing the confusion and resistance to wearing face masks by

some sections of the population and boosting vaccination roll-out and

take-up across the population.

The challenges and controversies surrounding the strategies

adopted by governments to tackle the coronavirus pandemic in the

United Kingdom and the United States, have been echoed in many

other countries, albeit with different issues coming to the fore. For

example, in Spain, the government has declared that coronavirus vac-

cination is voluntary but has put in place measures to record those

refusing to have the vaccination on the individuals' health records.

The Spanish government has come under considerable fire over its

policies as infection numbers have trebled, and hospital admissions

doubled. The government has eschewed calls for an even tighter lock-

down, ‘gambling’that the second coronavirus wave is peaking and

looking to vaccination to help bring down the infection rates.

In Italy, particular controversy has surrounded the Health Minister

of the Lombardy region's suggestion that areas with stronger econo-

mies should receive priority for vaccinations. Reacting to the outcry

this statement generated, the Minister argued that this was not about

giving more vaccines to richer regions, but by helping regions such as

Lombardy recover, it would automatically help the country's recovery

as a whole. Whatever the merits of such an argument, inevitably it

has been portrayed as allowing privileged, wealthier areas to ‘buy’

access to vaccines ahead of less wealthy area/populations. Because

Lombardy is the most populous region of Italy, it has accounted for

almost a third of Italy's coronavirus deaths (over 82,000). It already

has received the largest share of vaccine doses. The suggested re-

focusing of Italy's vaccine strategy highlighted the importance of how

any such policy is communicated and ‘sold’to the public.

Because of the worldwide demand for coronavirus vaccine, inevi-

tably the question of securing adequate supply and then distribution

DOI: 10.1002/pa.2642

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