Most Canadians still support booster doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to better protect against the virus, a new poll shows, even as the number of people rolling up their sleeves for extra shots has stalled
The Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for Global News found that 66% of respondents said they would get a booster shot without hesitation, and three-quarters agreed that boosters reduce the risk of hospitalization
However, only 49 of the population received an additional dose after completing their initial two-dose series, according to federal data, a rate that has remained stable for several weeks.
“The urgency of this is not what it was, say, a year or 18 months ago,” said Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs.
“There is an intention to push … but there doesn’t seem to be an urgency to do so.”
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Read more: 4th dose of COVID-19: What’s the value of an extra boost?
Ipsos polled more than 1,000 Canadian adults online last week for its poll.
The results echo national statistics, with 43 percent of respondents saying they have received three doses of the vaccine so far, while only 15 percent said they have had four, up from the reported nine percent by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). ).
Despite strong support for boosters, the survey also found that 53 per cent of Canadians surveyed are concerned about the long-term effects of getting multiple booster shots and how many they will have to get in the future.
However, this figure has dropped three points since January. So has the percentage of Canadians who say they are concerned about the health implications of contracting COVID-19, which has dropped eight points to 61 per cent of respondents.
“That emotional need to say, ‘I have to get (the vaccine) to save my life right now,’ is not what it was today when we first started making vaccines available,” Bricker said.
“It’s starting to look more like what people think about flu shots, rather than something that’s a protection against something that could be really, really urgent, deadly. So it’s becoming part of what people see as, I’m afraid to say, almost as (a part of) normal life.”
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1:48 COVID-19: When is the best time to get the fourth booster shot? COVID-19: When is the best time to get the fourth booster shot? – July 13, 2022
The survey comes after the National Advisory Council on Immunization (NACI) advised last month that Canadians, particularly those at higher risk of serious illness from COVID-19, should be offered a booster before a predicted autumn wave of the pandemic, regardless of how many doses they have already had.
Public health officials say the additional boost will further strengthen immunity against current and future variants of the virus, which have proven to be more transmissible than previous strains.
Provinces and territories have begun opening eligibility for more boosters to all adults, and officials say they want to avoid a further spike in hospitalizations and deaths.
The Ipsos survey found that older Canadians are more likely to support the boosters and fear COVID-19 than younger Canadians.
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That appears to line up with provincial data showing boosters have been much more popular among older Canadians. In Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, for example, uptake of third doses among residents aged 70 and over has exceeded 85%, while less than half of those under 40 have received their first booster.
Read more: Canadians urged to get COVID-19 booster shots ahead of possible fall surge
Unsurprisingly, the survey also found that respondents who are not vaccinated at all (only 12 percent of respondents) or who have received only one dose are more skeptical of boosters, with 60 percent saying that the additional injections are not helpful. Only 25 percent of those who received a booster agreed with this statement.
However, the survey noted that most people with two doses but no booster agreed that the additional injection will help prevent infection and hospitalization. More than 70% of respondents said they got their second shot six months or more ago, while 46% said they would get a booster without hesitation, suggesting many Canadians could get another dose soon.
Bricker says he hopes future campaigns by public health officials encouraging people to get boosters will eventually succeed, as long as there’s proper communication and easy access.
“Once again, the intention is with the public. They just need to be reminded of the need to do this … and that there is an easy way to do the right thing,” he said.
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These are some of the findings of an Ipsos survey conducted between 12 and 13 July 2022 on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of 1,001 Canadians over the age of 18 were interviewed. Quotas and weighting were used to ensure that the composition of the sample reflected that of the Canadian population according to census parameters. The accuracy of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the survey is accurate by ±3.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, if all Canadians over the age of 18 had been surveyed. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. All surveys and sample surveys may be subject to other sources of error, including but not limited to coverage errors and measurement errors.
© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.