Officials work to keep people coming for vaccines
Challenges include access for those at high risk, hesitancy among lower-risk or minority groups
In recent weeks, the age and other requirements for eligibility for a COVID-19 vaccine in Indiana have changed to encompass an ever-growing group of residents.
Gov. Eric Holcomb recently added teachers, child care workers and school staff to that list and has announced that, if vaccine supplies from the federal government are great enough, anyone age 16 and up will be eligible for a vaccine starting March 31.
Health officers in Lake and Porter counties, however, said some groups of people are still hesitant to get the vaccine, despite the scientifically proven safety of the two-dose Moderna and Pfizer vaccines and the one-dose vaccine by Johnson & Johnson.
The reasons vary, though Gary Health Commissioner Dr. Roland Walker said the challenge in his community is about access, while in Porter County, young health care workers in long term care facilities, eligible by virtue of their jobs, are shunning the shots because they don’t see the need.
“The State Department of Health has been working on an information campaign to help people understand the safety and efficacy of the vaccine and deal with vaccine hesitancy,” said Dr. Maria Stamp, Porter County’s health officer. “Right now, we’re just working hard to vaccinate the people asking for a vaccine.”
She is seeing the most hesitancy in people who are skeptical about vaccines in general, including seasonal flu shots, and young people ages 20 to 29 who work in health care. In one of the county’s long term care facilities, 25% of the staff are not vaccinated.
“That really doesn’t help
protect the really vulnerable residents of the nursing home we’d like to protect,” she said, adding some facilities are still seeing infections among their residents.
The young people, Stamp said, are generally healthy and low risk, and tend to be asymptomatic or have minimum symptoms if they get COVID-19, so they may be unwilling to risk vaccine side effects. She also noted internet rumors that the vaccine could impact pregnancy or future pregnancies.
“The risks of women who are pregnant getting the virus are pretty significant” and greatly outweigh any unfounded vaccine concerns, she said.
The health department is in the process of figuring out which long term care facilities have low vaccination rates among health care workers and providing them accurate information on the COVID-19 vaccines.
Additionally, Stamp hopes that in the next month or two, the health department can organize a mobile unit to bring the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine to those workers at their places of employment, so they don’t have to go anywhere to get vaccinated.
“We’ve had over a million people vaccinated in Indiana,” Stamp said. “I’m hoping more and more people will see that and go, ‘I might as well get vaccinated.’”
In Gary, Walker, the health commissioner there, said the narrative is generally that people of color are hesitant to get vaccines because of mistrust over how the medical community has treated people of color in the past but he’s found that can be dealt with “pretty easily” with education, including sharing his own story about getting vaccinated.
The bigger issue in his community is access, including people with “significant co-morbidities” who cannot get to sites to get vaccinated.
There’s also a challenge for people to get the slots available in the community.
“We get people from downstate, from hundreds of miles away, so if there’s any hesitancy at all, the slots are all taken up,” he said, adding Indiana residents from across the state, including as far away as Evansville, have come to Gary to get vaccinated.
While Chicago segregates who it vaccinates by area code so it can more easily target communities for the shots, Walker said he suggested that to the state and was told it was against federal regulations for vaccine distribution so he couldn’t do it.
Meanwhile, at the Gary Health Department, only 40% of the people getting vaccines are from Gary.
“The Gary Health Department has never been so popular,” Walker said, adding that while a lot of people recognize the importance of getting the vaccine, the people in his community may lack the internet access to make an appointment or the transportation to get to one.