The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released the CISA Insights: COVID-19 Vaccination Hesitancy within the Critical Infrastructure (https://www.cisa.gov/insights). It provides an overview of COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy and steps that critical infrastructure owners and operators can take to reduce the risk and encourage vaccine acceptance across their critical sectors’ workforce.
COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy within the critical infrastructure workforce represents a risk to our National Critical Functions and critical infrastructure companies and operations. The World Health Organization defines vaccine hesitancy as a “delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccination services.” Recent reports show a high percentage of healthcare workers, frontline essential workers, and other critical infrastructure workforces are hesitant or outright refuse to receive a vaccine for the virus that causes COVID-19.
If vaccine acceptance is low across our critical infrastructure workforce, the broader population may also be reluctant to accept the vaccine when it becomes available to them.
Employers of frontline workers within the critical infrastructure sectors are essential to reducing vaccine hesitancy within their workforce by becoming messengers of accurate, reliable, and timely information. CISA recognizes that this critical infrastructure workforce can serve as a key stakeholder in encouraging the rest of the population to get vaccinated and help the return to everyday life. Building and sustaining public trust and confidence in immunization systems is essential and the critical infrastructure workforce can play a leading role.
For additional resources see the CDC’s Essential Workers COVID-19 Vaccine Toolkit(https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/toolkits/essential-workers.html). This toolkit provides multiple communications templates and promotional products to help employers effectively communicate clear and credible information to their critical infrastructure workforce about the vaccine.
Business and infrastructure partners are also invited to access the FEMA NBEOC dashboard via the following link:
https://fema.connectsolutions.com/nbeoc
For questions regarding this CISA Insight, please visit the CISA COVID-19 Resource Page or contact us at Central@CISA.DHS.GOV for questions regarding this Insight or the Partners Call.
Respectfully,
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
Defend Today Secure Tomorrow
