As Caribbean Community (CARICOM) states seek to fight against COVID-19 disinformation, the Barbadian head of the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA) said she has been horrified at how people of the region have been sucked into anti-vaccination campaigns.CARPHA Executive Director Dr Joy St John said on Wednesday that despite the great effort of health officials and CARICOM leaders to promote the safe use of COVID-19 vaccines for the benefit of citizens, misleading information surrounding the pandemic has had a negative impact on vaccine uptake.She said the vaccine hesitancy that swept over North America and Europe had arrived on the shores of the Caribbean as the number of cases of COVID-19 increased.“I witnessed the most coordinated and relentless campaign of mainly social media-led anti-vaccination messages that I have ever seen in almost 30 years of service as a public health practitioner,” Dr St John said.“I watched in horror as the people of my region embraced those messages in a way that slowed the success of the creative and wide-reaching COVID-19 vaccination efforts underway from the north to the south of the Caribbean.”
