THE EDITOR: Many parents of teenagers are adamant that they are not giving their children any covid19 vaccine. Many of them are being misinformed by social media and getting information from their friends and family who may also be getting their misinformation from social media. A plan needs to be devised to overcome this.

How about assigning particular doctors to be 'vaccine ambassadors.' They should be trained (only brief training should be required if the participants are carefully chosen) on the issues they need to address and how to answer possible questions that may arise.

Each secondary school can be used as a vaccination site for one day. On that day, one of the doctors who had been trained in the art of providing information on vaccines will address all students of that school and their parents (those who choose to attend).

During this session, the doctor will talk about the advantages of taking the vaccine and the disadvantages of not taking it. There should be a question-and-answer session at the end since there may be people who did not listen carefully.

Because of social distancing it will be necessary to have more than one session at each school. Even so, it would be better if the doctor speaks in person rather than playing a video since people are more likely to listen to an actual person.

Vaccines should be available immediately after the talk since there is the risk that the students and their parents would go home and be convinced otherwise again.

Even if four such sessions are required in a school this would be far better than not having the children vaccinated.

We need to try whatever we can to get things back to normal.

JENNY SINGH

via e-mail