Despite delays, vaccines still our best shot

The state Department of Health announcement Tuesday that all Pennsylvania residents 65 years and older are eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine is good news in this ongoing battle against a pandemic that has claimed more than 400,000 lives in the U.S. in the past 10 months.

But expanding the eligibility doesn’t get the preventative medicine in people’s arms. As long as a majority remain unvaccinated, the virus will continue spreading — at an even faster rate with mutations that are taking hold.

The lags in getting vaccinated are for the most part due to supply and demand. In a state like Pennsylvania where 2.27 million people are over 65, there are just not enough doses. So far Pennsylvania has received only about 900,000 doses, according to the state Department of Health.

While that news is frustrating, there is encouragement that supplies will be replenished as manufacturing ramps up as additions from drugmakers AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson are expected to get FDA review and enter the pipeline in coming weeks.

And it is inevitable that states and counties will get better at the distribution and availability of vaccine, as well as boosting the sign-up capability. Right now, systems are crashing and people are waiting hours just to get access to websites to register for appointments.

However, what is even more troubling as thousands wait for the chance to be vaccinated is the reluctance among those who can get the vaccine and the skepticism being spun by naysayers.

In Berks County, Phil Salamone, public information officer of the Berks County EMS COVID-19 Joint Task Force and director of operations for Lower Alsace Ambulance, estimated there are 300 to 400 total workers in the ambulance crews in Berks and about a third of them “simply aren’t interested in obtaining the vaccine.”

Some of the reasons for refusing the vaccine might be that younger people don’t believe getting COVID will do them much harm, while other people have heard of side effects that are simply rumors and have no basis in science; those who had COVID believe they are immune anyway, and some people simply bristle at what they consider to be a herd mentality.

“The message needs to be that if we’re going to get through this pandemic we need to vaccinate as many people as possible. We wouldn’t recommend something if the benefit didn’t outweigh the risk,” Dr. Robert J. Tomsho told The Reading Eagle. Tomsho is medical director of the emergency medicine institute, Lehigh Valley Health Network, and oversees training for ambulance crews.

The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are “essentially 100 percent effective against serious disease,” Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told David Leonhardt for The New York Times “The Morning” newsletter. “It’s ridiculously encouraging.”

These vaccines are among the best vaccines ever created, with effectiveness rates of about 95 percent after two doses, Leonhardt wrote. “If there is an example of a vaccine in widespread clinical use that has this selective effect — prevents disease but not infection — I can’t think of one!” Dr. Paul Sax of Harvard has written in The New England Journal of Medicine, dismissing speculation that getting a vaccine won’t stop the spread.

Concerns are reported to be even more widespread among low-income and people of color, even though those populations have suffered the most cases and deaths. Officials in Montgomery County addressed those concerns head-on Thursday night in a town hall with Black church leaders encouraging their communities to participate and air their concerns.

A few decades ago, the nation underwent a rollout of another vaccine that successfully eradicated polio, and then more vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella — all of them having dramatic effect on public health and saving thousands of lives. This rollout needs to proceed with the hopeful enthusiasm that accompanied those vaccines. Efficiency and communication should be easier, not harder, in this age of technology and internet sophistication.

This vaccine remains our best chance to tame the pandemic and restore normalcy. This is our best shot; we need to take it.