Vaccine hesitancy needle phobias have power to disrupt WA jab rollout

October 27, 2021 â€" 9.09am

There are some of us who are vaccine hesitant, and it’s not because we’re worried that the COVID vaccine will rewrite our DNA or that the government has surreptitiously inserted a microchip to track us.

It’s because the thought of being stabbed with a sharp pointy object makes our blood run cold.

A shot in the arm is a lot more intimidating to those of us who aren’t particularly fond of needles. Credit:Getty Images

I’m jarred and scarred by endless news items on the progress of the vaccination drive and its accompanying vision of needles being driven into arms. Giant images of syringes on online news stories and social media feeds.

Journalists overusing the rather violent word “jabbed”. Watching celebrities and politicians get their vaccine live on TV is triggering, not reassuring. And we scaredy cats pose a risk that could disrupt the vaccination campaign as we delay and perhaps refuse to be vaccinated.

My pathological needle phobia likely began at the age of five.

I was climbing the pantry cupboards to get a snack unskillfully hidden by the parentals on the top shelf and fell backwards onto the can opener attached to the wall.

The circular blade ran down my scalp as I fell to the floor. Wall-mounted can openers were a thing in the 80s. Later relegated to the scrap heap along with the Sony Walkman and Casio calculator watch.

Wailing with a gaping head wound, I was bundled in to the car on mum’s lap, siblings looking on in wide-eyed wonderment at this excitement that unexpectedly befell this unremarkable Sunday afternoon.

What came next still gives me the heebie-jeebies. My GP inserted a numbing needle INTO the wound before sewing me up with five stitches. There was none of this coloured glue business they use these days or dissolvable stitches. These had to be tugged out later from my tender noggin.

So scared of needles I was from there on in I was yanked out of school when they had mass school-based immunisation drives so I could faint in the doctor’s office rather than a gymnasium full of my peers.

The fear continued into my 20s and 30s, so my mum or nanna would need to escort me to any medical procedures that involved needles. The slew of vaccines I needed before a backpacking trip around Vietnam. The time I sliced my hand open washing a wine glass. When I needed eye surgery.

I managed to avoid the worst needle of them all â€" the dreaded blood test â€" until I was pregnant in my late 20s. The thought of a needle siphoning my blood was enough to send my heart rate skyrocketing to 200 and drop my blood pressure so low I fainted.

I’ve convulsed. I’ve sweated so much that I’ve left a pool of water on the bed I need to lie down on. I was so staunchly averse to being jabbed in the back for an epidural that I gave birth to an oversized progeny sans drugs. Thankfully, the second one was a little undercooked.

Up to 10 per cent of the population has a moderate to severe phobia of needles, fancy name trypanophobia.

This small but not insignificant cohort of vaccine hesitant folk presents a problem for authorities pushing for Australia’s vaccination rate to nudge as close to 100 per cent as possible. It is a percentage that has the power to disrupt the vaccination program.

Complicating the matter is the fact it’s not one needle but at least two or three, possibly many more depending on how this unprecedented pandemic plays out.

A recent Oxford University survey of more than 15,000 adults in the UK suggests needle phobia accounts for about 10 per cent of COVID vaccine hesitancy.

So I’m not alone.

And while I have a healthy scepticism about vaccines and government directives that it’s perfectly safe, historically the experts do occasionally let some dangerous drugs through the net. Consider thalidomide, a drug marketed as a treatment for morning sickness in pregnant women in the late 50s and early 60s later found to cause serious birth defects. It was a tragedy.

But for now, I trust that the COVID vaccines currently available are the best way out of this pandemic.

So I rolled up my sleeve to do my bit. I avoided the mass vaccination centres which, frankly, are pretty public places to have a meltdown and a place where you’re herded through like cattle. I thought I’d be enduring the procedure under intense distress.

Honestly, the needle is tiny. It really doesn’t hurt a bit.

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