Vaccination efforts ramp up among Indigenous communities.
Health officials working to inoculate members of Indigenous groups
Indigenous health care providers in San Diego County are working to rapidly administer COVID-19 vaccinations to the tribal communities they serve. In some cases, that means building trust with a demographic suspicious of the federal government.
At the onset of the pandemic, there were worries among Indigenous communities throughout the county, who often have higher rates of chronic health conditions, such as diabetes and asthma, that can make them more susceptible to infections.
Throughout the pandemic, there have been 788 Native Americans who have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, 43 who have been hospitalized and 13 who have died, according to county health data.
On March 17, San Diego County public health officials reported that there have been 4,219 Indigenous people locally who have been vaccinated for COVID-19, which represents 0.6 percent of those who have been vaccinated. But according to U.S. Census data from 2019, Native Americans make up 1.3 percent of the county’s population.
Urban Indian Health Institute, an organization based in Seattle that researches Indigenous health issues, released a survey in January that found while there is some hesitancy regarding the safety of the vaccines, two-thirds of the people polled were willing to receive their shots.
While 89 percent of those polled wanted more evidence that it will be safe in both the short- and longterm, 74 percent said it was their responsibility to their community to be vaccinated. Additionally, 39 percent said it was difficult to travel to their local clinic for a vaccination appointment.
The Indian Health Service clinics serving both Indigenous and non-native patients in San Diego County have been ramping up their efforts to distribute the vaccinations to those they serve. These include Indian Health Council, San Diego American Indian Health Center, Southern Indian Health Council, and Sycuan Medical Dental Center in El Cajon.
As of Thursday, the four clinics have administered at least 6,614 shots of COVID-19 vaccinations to 4,031 people. Of the total shots administered, 2,581 have been second shots. Locally, there has been some hesitancy as the clinics move through the tier system, with Sycuan, Indian Health Council and
San Diego American Indian Health Centers all seeing about a 50 percent hesitancy rate among their patients.
“With the vaccine, I do see a little bit — from historical trauma — of reluctancy for getting the vaccine,” said Kevin LaChapelle, CEO for San Diego American Indian Health Center in Bankers Hill. “(Native) people were basically experimented on back in the day, so there’s a mistrust of government and people saying, ‘Well, how do we know this is not going to hurt us?’ ”
In the 1970s, more than 3,000 native women and girls were forcibly sterilized, most of whom were of childbearing age and some as young as 15, according to UCLA’s American Indian Culture and Research Journal.
In 2004, the Havasupai Tribe filed a lawsuit against the Arizona Board of Regents and Arizona State University researchers after finding DNA samples meant for diabetes research in the 1990s were used without permission in other genetic studies, according to a Center for Integration of Research on Genetics & Ethics paper.
Combating hesitancy
LaChapelle said that a social media campaign highlighting elders who have received their shots has been helpful in getting more people on board.
Southern Indian Health Council in Alpine and Campo serves patients from seven tribes, as well as nonnative people in the surrounding community. CEO Laura Caswell said there had been a lot of hesitancy among both patients and employees in the beginning of the vaccination rollout.
But much of that hesitancy has ceased as more information is made available, and as tribal leaders and elders get their shots.
“As we’re starting to roll out more, we’re starting to see people now change their minds and come back and say ‘OK, now I want it. I feel comfortable,’ ” Caswell said.
In Valley Center, the Indian Health Council serves people from nine local tribes in San Diego and Riverside counties.
The clinic has been able to move quickly down through the vaccination tier system because there were so few individuals within the 75 and older age bracket, which Chief Medical Officer Dan Calac from the Pauma Band of Luiseño Indians said is due largely to the prevalence of health disparities within native populations. Losing elders has a huge impact on the community at large, as they are often the keepers of traditional knowledge, practices and stories.
“We have lost many of our elders,” said Calac, adding that it’s been difficult confronting “the magnitude of the problem with dealing and counseling these people after losing these elders who have this repository of ... knowledge of what’s happened over the past 100 years. The songs, the tales, the importance of relations, about who is related to who, and historical information can never be brought back, so it has had a profound effect.”
On March 20, Sycuan Casino Resort hosted a free vaccination clinic for its approximately 1,776 staff, the tribe said in a statement Tuesday.
“With the tribe having the ability to plot our own recovery course, the vaccination of all of our team members is a critical piece of that,” Sycuan Chairman Cody Martinez said.
So far, Sycuan has vaccinated tribal elders and members, as well as members of its police and fire departments, security officers, medical and dental staff, and and teachers and staff from the Sycuan Education Department. Doses have also been administered to teachers from Alpine Union, Dehesa and Cajon Valley school districts.
Clinic holds first mass vaccination event
On March 3, San Diego American Indian Health Center administered shots of the Moderna vaccine to 348 individuals from various cultural backgrounds in its first mass vaccination event.
Staff at the downtown health center serve both native and non-native patients, about a third of whom identify as Indigenous, and they also work closely with the local homeless population. As they were administering shots among their patients — in order of oldest to youngest — they started receiving additional shots, so they decided to open up appointments to more people throughout the city.
One attendee and new patient to the clinic, Lane Yazzie, was excited to get their first vaccination shot as a way to better protect themselves and the community at large.
Yazzie and their family are from the Diné (Navajo) Nation of Arizona, where they lived before moving to attend San Diego State University. Getting vaccinated was important to them after seeing the way the novel coronavirus devastated their community back home, which was one of the major epicenters for the pandemic in the United States last spring.
As of March 12, there have been 29,930 people from the tribe who have tested positive for the virus and 1,215 who have died from it, according to the tribe’s COVID-19 response website.
“As native people, we have years of surviving plagues, surviving pandemics, and I think it’s really good for us to get vaccinated just so we can protect our people, protect our tribes and really ensure the survival for the future,” Yazzie said.
Another patient being vaccinated, 60-year-old Laurie Docktor from the Cherokee Nation, had tears in her eyes as she described her happiness in finally being able to get her first shot of the vaccine.
Docktor has an eye disease — wet macular degeneration — that requires frequent shots of medicine in her eye. She has worried over the past year that if she got COVID-19 and couldn’t get a treatment, she could lose her vision.
“Getting the shot, starting that journey, which will take a month and a half, just feels like in a way I will get my life back,” Docktor said.
In the coming weeks, LaChapelle said there will be another mass vaccination clinic and they would also like to deploy the facility’s two mobile clinic vans to vaccinate those who are homebound or otherwise have trouble traveling to appointments.