Covid‐19 vaccination among people with disability—Statement from the iADH scientific committee

Abstract

Covid-19 vaccination among people with disability-Statement from the iADH scientific committeeScientific evidence is the best resource available to make health decisions either at individual or at community levels. To build such evidence, time is a key factor. The COVID-19 global pandemic has challenged scientistsť and cliniciansť ability to produce and test sufficient sound evidence regarding different strategies to limit the spread of coronavirus and its consequences. Having scrambled in the dark at the beginning of the pandemic, the facts are now becoming clear. We benefit day by day from the innovations and understanding that science has brought to the front line in the war against COVID-19. The bulwark of our ongoing defenses against this viral enemy is vaccination. The evidence shows great promise that COVID-19 vaccination conveys many individual and population-level benefits (see Box 1).It remains that most of this evidence comes from general population data, due to exclusion from research for people with disability, severe mental illnesses and other high-risk vulnerable populations. This lack of evidence may result in additional barriers to predictable and successful vaccination among vulnerable groups, 5 who already tend to be less likely to avail of immunization services in general, for reasons that are not fully understood. 6,7 The pursuit of health equity for vaccine guidance requires a roadmap to navigate health inequities with interventions that uphold the ethical principle of justice with the socially just distribution of limited resources. It should be applied within and between countries and regions so that supplies of COVID-19 vaccines are effectively distributed globally based on a gradient of risk rather than a gradient of wealth. 8 With this in mind, it is known that adults with wide a range of disabilities and medical conditions, who typically attend special care dental teams, are at higher odds of hospitalization and mortality due to COVID-19 infection than the general population. 9 In fact, so great is the increased risk to our population with disabilities that in England, 60% of people who died from COVID-19 in 2020 had a disability. 10 Personnel working with populations requiring Special Care Dentistry must advocate the effectiveness of vaccination for all people to ensure equitable outcomes for the world's most vulnerable citizens.

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and attitudes of subjects with disability and their carers in Saudi Arabia: a cross-sectional study

“…Attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination, including acceptance, hesitancy, and resistance, have been extensively studied in several populations in Saudi Arabia. However, not a single study addressed such an issue among this disadvantaged population, i.e., people with disability, who are at great risk health inequality, especially during COVID-19 ( 12 ). This study attempts to address this gap of knowledge by examining the attitudes of people with disability toward COVID-19 vaccination and assessing the possible contributing factors to such attitudes.…”