Side Effects of National Immunization Program: E-Governance Support Toward Elders' Digital Inclusion

Abstract

In response to the coronavirus pandemic, the European Union (EU) governments develop policies to regulate exclusive health protection actions that consider societal needs with the emphasis on elders. Given that the EU vaccination strategy uses a centralized ICT-based approach, there is little guidance on how seniors are included in national immunization programs (NIP). In this paper, we addressed a knowledge gap of the side effects of e-governance of NIP for the elderly. To fill this gap, we identified 40 side effects by analyzing online textual opinions (tweets, comments, articles) that express public perception regarding the results of the Polish NIP implementation to seniors' digital inclusion, categorized them into 8 categories and assign them to four e-governance functions. The main contribution of this paper is a better understanding of the digital divide and to provide guidelines for government policy improvement.