BEST SHOT?
Experts discuss local vaccine coordination
The coronavirus vaccines are here, but are they going into arms in the Dayton area? Health officials here and around the nation are educating the public and administrating shots that hopefully will help save lives and return us to normal. For the most recent installment of the Dayton Daily News Community Conversation, we reconvened a panel of experts we featured in December.
Two additional panelists —
Dr. Roberto Colon, system vice president of quality and safety at Premier Health, and associate chief medical officer at Miami Valley Hospital, and
Fabrice Juin, project manager of the Montgomery County Office of Minority Health — were added for Dayton Daily News Community Conversations: The Coronavirus Vaccines: Where Do We Stand? The other panelists were:
■ Dr. Mamle Anim, chief medical officer for Five Rivers Health Centers.
■ Sheryl Harris Wynn, Greene County Public Health accreditation coordinator, planning chief for the pandemic response and vaccination planning team leader.
■ Dr. Robert W. Frenck Jr., professor of pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, director of the Gamble Center for Vaccine Research and the immunization program medical director of the Ohio Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
■ Vicky Knisley-Henry, a health educator for Miami County Public Health.
■ Dr. Thomas Hirt, PriMED Centerville Family Practice physician.
Most of the panelists have had the vaccines. All encourage others to get it when it becomes available to them.
Colon likened his experience with the vaccine to the mild soreness of getting a tetanus booster.
“The individuals who have had the vaccine, most of them have had very similar reactions. Some soreness. I can tell you that most of what we’re seeing aren’t really side effects; they’re actually immunologic reactions to the vaccine. It’s the body actually reacting. So it is a sign that things are working,” he said. “It hasn’t been a reaction that has gone awry. We have not seen really anything severe. Most of the time it has been some redness, maybe some swelling, usually goes away within a few days.”
Below are excerpts from the conversation edited for clarity and length.
QUESTION: Before assuming office, President Joe Biden called the vaccine rollout a dismal failure. Is he right? DR. ROBERT W. FRENCK JR.:
“In a year, being able to go from identifying a virus to having two of (vaccines) now through the emergency use authorization really is a tremendous success.
“I think there are some areas for improvement, but I have confidence that we are going to get there. The frustration I’ve kind of sensed over the last month is that people are just tired, and that they’ve been dealing with this for a year and they want it to be done.
“Now they see there’s a vaccine there, and they say, ‘Why am I not getting it now?’ If you think about it, of trying to move that many doses of vaccine throughout the country is a huge logistic effort, but we’re getting better at it.
“We’re getting more doses, so I know it’s hard to hang in there, but that’s really what we need to do for the next few months.
“I really feel very strongly by May or June that we’re going to have plenty of doses for everybody, hopefully sooner.”
FABRICE JUIN: “Seeing
firsthand how hard our local health institutions are working, I’d hate to describe their efforts and sacrifices as failures. That’s just not a word I would use whatsoever.
“Understaffed and under-resourced maybe, but they are fighting the good fight. As Dr. Frenck said, I’d absolutely agree that as we continue to find that formula, we’re going to get better at this. Hopefully we do end this battle in the short sense and don’t prolong it any more than we need to.”
DR. MAMLE ANIM: “We could have moved to the different groups, a little bit faster. Maybe the holidays played a role and all that the timing was just right there, but I felt like we could have moved from 1A, and then maybe two weeks later moved to 1B.
“This is going to be an accumulative thing. We are not going to ever finish one group.
“It just sort of keeps layering. If there is something I could see differently, that’s what I would have said. The movement would have been more smooth, but it was right before Christmas and New Year and everything kind of slowed down and that’s probably what happened.”
SHERYL HARRIS WYNN:
“I would just say working on coordinating and planning for that ahead of receiving it was one thing, and then once it hit the door, it was a whole other animal.
“We have received our vaccine relatively timely. The shipments
come out weekly, and again what we receive, we try our best to get it into the arms of people within that week.
“We do like to wait until we have it in hand before we promise it to anyone, so logistically it is a challenge, but when we think back to when we were on this line last we had nothing.
“We had the hope of receiving something and then about a week or so later, we began to receive it. Starting out with something this massive and this many layers, from the federal level on.
“I can speak for the state of Ohio. I think we’re doing quite well. When you see things on the news, we’re not having those types of scenarios here that we’ve seen in Florida, and those types of things.
“As we begin to receive more vaccine, I can say as a public health worker for a number of years we’ve been planning for the mass clinics, and that is something that we’re able to do.
“If the product is in hand, we will be able to administer it in an expedient manner. For now, what we receive, we administer it, and we wait for the next shipment, and we administer that, we wait for the next shipment, and we administer that.
“With the 1B population coming in, our team has been spending a lot of time on the phone getting people signed up that don’t have access to computers and just kind of
talking them through, and trying to allay their concerns.
“Not their concerns about the vaccine itself, more of concerns of how will I know where to go and when to come, how can I get signed up, can you help me get signed up, people calling in for their parents to assist them.
“Logistically, we only have so much staff. While we’re trying to coordinate and prepare to administer it. We’re also trying to maintain our case management and our contact tracing. All of those aspects of it, along with trying to just address the public and not leave anyone hanging that is calling and seeking information.”
QUESTION: What is being done to reach Black, brown and other people reluctant to take a coronavirus vaccine?
FABRICE JUIN: “We are working to change the narrative. Obviously, what you see on a national level is what we see on the local level with all these doubts and hesitancies.
“Instead of placing the burden and blame on our residents by claiming that vaccine hesitancy is hindering our vaccination efforts, we’re trying to move in the direction of recognizing that at some point, our nation’s health institutions lost the trust of those that it should have been serving.
“Whether it was in Ohio or in Montgomery County or somewhere else. Whether it happened yesterday or 50 years ago, that did happen.
“You wouldn’t approach the descendants of the Tuskegee syphilis study or the descendants of enslaved black women that J. Marion Sims experimented on to make some of the gynecological advances that he is credited for. You wouldn’t even approach those affected by the Flint Michigan water crisis and ask the question ‘Why don’t you trust these institutions today?’ You wouldn’t ask that question of these individuals.
“All you can do is acknowledge the issue about the experiences and feelings of these individuals. While we can never fully correct the ills of the past, we want to show that we’re dedicated to making sure that we don’t let them
down again and that goes with COVID-19.
“(We want to make) sure that the vaccine is administered equitably and really figuring out what can we do to, you know, get you on the side of protecting yourself and protecting your family and those around you.
“The battle we’re dealing with right now, it’s a tough one, but we’re dedicated to it.”
DR. ROBERTO COLON: “A big piece that gets overlooked is the leading by example, but then sharing the experience and the information.
“I think that’s a very powerful tool, which is why it’s so important to be able to do those educational activities, to be able to sometimes just do the word of mouth and talk to each other.
“That can be a much more powerful way of changing perceptions than trying to get at why your point of view may be wrong or why you’re misguided.”
DR. THOMAS HIRT:
“That’s an important point, definitely the one-on-one communication.
“I had a gentlemen who saw me the other day, he had been in about three months ago and had asked me hey me, ‘Hey, what do you think about this vaccine? Are you going to get it?’
“I said, ‘Well, I’m not sure yet. I want to see some more data. I want to make sure it’s safe and effective.’ I wasn’t sure three months ago. Now we’ve seen more data. We see that it’s effective.
“Long story but, I found out from one of my partners that Public Health Montgomery County was doing clinics for health care providers. The day after Christmas he sent me a text it was a couple minutes before 2 p.m. Got my car, drove downtown and was shot in my shoulder about 45 minutes after I heard that I could get the shot.
“I’ve been using that example, telling it to patients. I think one on one communication is so important.”
VICKY KNISLEY-HENRY:
“Kind of early on, back maybe late summer, we had some questions from the German Baptist community.
“They’re a little harder community to reach. Our epidemiologist actually set up, kind of a Q&A with the elders, and it went great.
“And so it’s just been kind of those interactions. We hear about groups that, you know, maybe have been not so much left in the dark but maybe just not as easy to reach.
“We’ve made it a point to try to reach out to those communities to just initiate that one-onone. It is needed. From from the response we got last week when we, when we opened up registration for the 80-plus group, If there was any hesitation, I think it’s gone.”