Meet vaccine volunteers
Black Nurses Coalition, others help to register the under-served for vaccine
Dr. Brenda Robinson and the Black Nurses Coalition she founded eight years ago have been working long hours since the coronavirus pandemic began, going door to door in the Capital Region’s marginalized communities delivering masks, hand sanitizer and toilet paper; taking blood pressure and providing public health education to Black and brown residents who have borne the brunt of COVID-19.
Whatever it is people need, the coalition has been finding ways to get it, Robinson said.
Now, the one thing many people want — a vaccine — is incredibly hard to get, even as supply has increased in recent weeks. And yet again, it’s the people her coalition serves who are having the most trouble getting it.
“The New York state database has been very difficult,” she said. “It has been very chaotic. And I do believe that it’s shameful how it’s easily manipulated by folks who are able to maneuver. It leaves out people of color and the other underserved people.”
Robinson and her coalition are among a growing group of people and organizations around the Capital Region who are dedicating their time to signing up and registering people for vaccine who might otherwise have difficulty accessing it. This includes — among others — older resi
dents, poor, people of color, people with disabilities, and people with caregiving duties or multiple jobs that leave them with little time to compete for coveted vaccine slots.
Black Nurses Coalition
For their part, the Black Nurses Coalition has been pounding the pavement in Albany’s Arbor Hill and West Hill neighborhoods, knocking on doors, hanging up fliers, and making sure people know vaccines are available and that they’re willing to help sign up and register them for appointments. They also offer rides to vaccine sites for those who lack transportation, and provide education about the vaccines’ safety, efficacy and side effects.
“(The coalition) has a variety of people who are from this community and people know them,” Robinson said. “That’s our secret and that’s something that really helps us. We’re in this community boots on the ground and we look like the community we’re trying to serve.”
On any given day the coalition has six to 10 people out and about on the vaccine signup project, Robinson said. And they work odd hours, making sure to capture people who have other engagements during the day. On Wednesday night, Robinson said the coalition was able to sign up five additional people they would not have otherwise by staying out late.
“Being out to 9:30 was well worth it for those five people that I got in because they are in close quarters, they are in a tough situation, and they really need to have a vaccine,” she said. “So we are thinking about the folks who need the vaccine, the circumstances of some folks. So it’s not just, oh, 65 and over or health care professional or any of those things. Sometimes you’ve got to look at the situation people actually live in, what makes them top on the list of needing that vaccine.”
The week before, the coalition signed up 75 people in hard-hit neighborhoods, she said. And while they encounter a fair amount of skepticism and fear about the vaccines, Robinson’s group is also finding many who want a vaccine but grew frustrated by the fragmented and chaotic process of trying to find one.
Constantly changing eligibility rules, limitations on which providers can administer vaccine, and an absence of any clear information about who exactly is getting vaccine has made signing up for an appointment an unenviable task for even the most determined of people.
“Yeah, you have an appointment. No, your appointment is canceled. No, the vaccine didn’t come. No, you have to go over here. No, you have to go over there. No, the link is not working. Oh, try this link. Oh, try that link,” Robinson said. “It is just very chaotic and I do think it makes our work harder because we have to go and reinforce the importance of the vaccine, the importance of being patient, and then we still can’t explain away the chaos. All we can do is agree that it is chaotic and we don’t like the system.”
Robinson said it’s an insult that state and federal leaders continue to be reactionary in their attempts to engage with communities of color, and that local on-the-ground people are not consulted when new vaccine sites come online that purport to reach these groups, such as the new Washington Avenue Armory site in Albany that opens Wednesday.
“Being that this has devastated brown and Black people, I do think leaders such as myself should be included in this process more than what we are,” Robinson said. “We should be at the decision-making table, not a table where you join a particular task force and all the task force can do is give information up to a bigger group. No, have those group leaders who are in this area at the actual table where decisions are being made and that is a huge problem.”
“So we are thinking about the folks who need the vaccine, the circumstances of some folks. So it’s not just, oh, 65 and over or health care professional or any of those things. Sometimes you’ve got to look at the situation people actually live in, what makes them top on the list of needing that vaccine.”
— Dr. Brenda Robinson
Information professionals
Some groups, frustrated that they haven’t already been approached by government leaders to assist with vaccine signups and education, are striking out on their own to assist. Albany Public Library is one of them, said Scott Jarzombek, executive director.
“We’ve kind of been frustrated as an organization because we’ve reached out multiple times to say, ‘You have information professionals and we want to help whatever way we can and be a part of this,’ and sometimes it’s just a ‘Hey, thanks for letting us know,’ and that has gotten pretty frustrating,” he said.
The library launched a pilot this past week, training six to 10 staff members to conduct outreach to patrons 65 and older to make sure they know vaccine is available and volunteer to get them on a registration list.
The registration site at alb.518c19.com was developed by the Alliance for Better Health and launched by Albany County earlier this month. It collects ZIP code data and allows the user to list any underlying health conditions they may have. It is being used by both the county and state to prioritize people at high risk for severe COVID -19 for special county-run clinics and the new joint state-federal Emergency Management Agency site at the armory.
“So far it has gone smoothly,” Jarzombek said in an email Thursday. “A bunch of sign-ups, a lot of people already registered, some data cleanup, and a lot of appreciation. It has been very positive and I think my staff enjoys being a part of it. In the end, we will end up helping people just by getting the word out and maybe add some clarity to the process. Which is kind of what libraries are supposed to do.”
Senior site helps
The Saratoga Senior Center is also assisting with sign-ups.
“Honestly as soon as they started announcing rollouts, pretty instantly the process that was in place at that point was online and we knew working with seniors on a regular basis that that was going to be problematic because so many of our folks do not have internet,” said Lois Celeste, executive director of the center.
With help from Skidmore College interns, the center began calling up its network of 1,500 members to make sure they knew vaccine was available and offer assistance signing up. The interns, who are social work majors, have been finding appointments any way they can, refreshing websites and checking with area pharmacies, Celeste said.
“It’s not been easy and many seniors are very frustrated,” she said. “Everybody is, but we’re still going to stay on top of the latest trends and news and how do we get these, be it calling and calling and getting online and doing all those kinds of things. Whatever we had to do is what we did to try to help folks.”
Recently, calls to the center have shifted from people seeking help with an appointment to people seeking rides to that appointment. The center, using a team of about 15 volunteers, offers rides to vaccine appointments with its van so people can still socially distance.
“We’re just all about meeting the need, whatever the need is right now for our demographic,” Celeste said.
Other efforts
Additional pushes are underway by organizations and individuals around the region.
The Alliance for Better Health, a network of Capital Region organizations serving marginalized communities, has been working to get the word out about its registration list.
Jewish Family Services of Northeastern New York is also offering sign-up help. People can call 518-482-8856 for help registering or getting an appointment. Those who live in Albany’s Neighborhood Naturally Occurring Retirement Community, or NNORC — an area with a significant proportion of people older than 60 — can call 518-514-2023 for help.
The Columbia County Community Healthcare Consortium, a network of health and human service providers serving rural communities in and around the county, is assisting those who lack access to a computer or internet register for vaccine. Interested individuals can call 518-822-9600.
Jess Haller, a third-year Albany Law School student who has been interning with Assemblywoman Patricia Fahy, said she is in the process of securing approval from Price Chopper to set up vaccine sign-up tables during the chain’s senior shopping hours. The early-morning shopping windows were established last spring when the pandemic made venturing out in public potentially dangerous for high-risk people.
“We get a lot of calls from constituents and that was a complaint we heard a lot,” Haller said. “Elderly people were having trouble with the technology and we assume that everyone has a computer or phone but not everyone does.”
The plan is to have masked volunteers work tables at local Price Chopper stores — perhaps set up behind Plexiglas, she said — where they take down names and other information required to sign people up or register them for vaccines.
“There are a lot of students who seem to be really interested in helping with this effort,” she said. “So hopefully we can start sooner rather than later.”
The Food and Drug Administration on Saturday authorized Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, beginning the rollout of millions of doses of a third effective vaccine that could reach Americans by early next week.
The announcement arrived at a critical moment, as the steep decline in coronavirus cases seems to have plateaued and millions of Americans are on waiting lists for shots.
Johnson & Johnson has pledged to provide the United States with 100 million doses by the end of June. When combined with the 600 million doses from the two-shot vaccines made by Pfizer-biontech and Moderna slated to arrive by the end of July, there will be more than enough shots to cover any U.S. adult who wants one.
But federal and state health officials are concerned that even with strong data to support it, some people may perceive Johnson & Johnson’s shot as an inferior option.
The new vaccine’s 72 percent efficacy rate in the U.S. clinical trial site — a number scientists have celebrated — falls short of the roughly 95 percent rate found in studies testing the Moderna and Pfizer-biontech vaccines. Across all trial sites, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine also showed 85 percent efficacy against severe forms of COVID-19 and 100 percent efficacy against hospitalization and death.
“Don’t get caught up, necessarily, on the number game, because it’s a really good vaccine, and what we need is as many good vaccines as possible,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said Saturday. “Rather than parsing the difference between 94 and 72, accept the fact that now you have three highly effective vaccines. Period.”
If Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine had been the first to be authorized in the United States instead of the third, “everybody would be doing handstands and back flips and highfives,” said Dr. James Mcdeavitt, dean of clinical affairs at Baylor College of Medicine.
On Sunday, a committee of vaccine experts who advise the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will meet to discuss whether certain population groups should be prioritized for the vaccine, guidance that state health officials have been eagerly awaiting in anticipation of the FDA’S authorization.
An administration official familiar with the distribution of the vaccine said that shipments would begin Monday and deliveries could arrive as soon as Tuesday.
Johnson & Johnson has said it will ship nearly 4 million doses as soon as the FDA authorizes distribution and another 16 million or so doses by the end of March. That is far fewer than the 37 million doses called for in its $1 billion federal contract, but the contract says that deliveries that are 30 days late will still be considered timely.
The federal government is paying the firm $10 a dose for a total of 100 million doses to be ready by the end of June, substantially less per dose than it agreed to pay Moderna and Pfizer, which developed its vaccine with a German partner, Biontech.
Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose vaccine will allow states to rapidly increase the number of people who have been fully inoculated. Unlike the other two vaccines, it can be stored at standard refrigeration temperatures for at least three months.
Dr. Danny Avula, vaccine coordinator for Virginia, said the Johnson & Johnson shipments would boost the state’s allotment of vaccine next week by nearly one-fifth.
“I’m super-pumped about this,” he said. “A hundred percent efficacy against deaths and hospitalizations? That’s all I need to hear.”
He said the state was planning mass vaccination events specifically for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, partly to quell any suspicion that it is a lesser product targeted to specific groups.
“It will be super clear that this is Johnson & Johnson, here’s what you need to know about it. If you want to do this, you’re coming in with eyes wide open,” he said. “If not, you will keep your place on the list.”
Michele Roberts, assistant secretary of Washington state’s health department, said that it would be difficult to explain the technical aspects of how Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine trials differed from those of other drugmakers. Because the studies were conducted at different times and with different protocols, precise comparisons can be problematic. All three trials showed the vaccines provided strong protection against COVID-19, especially for severe disease.
Understanding the subtle contrasts requires a lot of “scientific literacy,” she said. “There are so many different factors at play. But those aren’t, you know, quick public messages.”
Even some clinicians misinterpret the differences among the COVID-19 vaccines, health officials said. “They assume it’s apples to apples but it’s apples to oranges, or worse, apples to tires,” said Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some state officials have been frustrated by what they view as a lack of a coordinated plan from the Biden administration on how to deploy the new vaccine. Governors have asked the White House for guidance, but administration officials haveleft it up to the states to decide.
Even though Johnson & Johnson received ample federal support and agreed to manufacture at risk, federal officials familiar with its operation said the company took an overly conservative approach to production, emphasizing scaling up on the back end of its contract.