‘Tsunami of disinformation’: UK battles for BAME Covid-19 vaccine trust, translating jab information into 20 languages

The UK’s vaccines minister has said the government is translating vaccine information packs into 20 different languages in an attempt to contact hard-to-reach and BAME groups who are far more likely to turn down Covid-19 jabs.

Speaking on Tuesday, Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi told Sky News that the government is battling fake news, which appears to be disproportionately impacting vaccine uptake among ethnic minority groups. 

There is a tsunami of disinformation, misinformation, which we have a unit across government that is dealing with the technology platforms to take down this fake news. 

“We’re translating everything into 20 languages, from Arabic, to Farsi, to Hindi, to Polish, across the board. We have to reach those hard-to-reach groups,” Zahawi said.

The minister added that, while 89 percent of British adults are happy to take the vaccine, those who are “vaccine hesitant” are far more likely to be from an ethnic minority background and can be hard-to-reach. 

Zahawi has previously warned that the virus may spread “like wildfire” through BAME groups when lockdown is relaxed unless they come forward to take their jabs. 

Recent studies have even found that black and non-white people working in healthcare across the UK are far less likely to be vaccinated than their white colleagues, despite having first-hand knowledge of the deadly virus. 

On Monday, British Health Secretary Matt Hancock urged BAME healthcare workers to come forward and get inoculated against Covid-19, after a new report showed white NHS staff are almost twice as likely as black staff to get vaccinated.

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