Now is the time for us to tackle COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy
Amelie Ramirez has received both doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. The first left her arm a bit sore, as if she had bumped it against something. But she took a dose of Tylenol prior to receiving the second dose, which she’d heard might cause more pain, and everything was fine.
And that, Ramirez explained to me Tuesday, is the kind of message Texans need to hear from leaders in their communities if we’re to overcome the widespread qualms about the COVID vaccine that could stymie our efforts to reach herd immunity and move past this horrific pandemic.
“It should be local leaders, from the communities of color,” said Ramirez, a professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio who has long studied health disparities faced by Latinos. “The messengers should look like them, and be someone that our community trusts — whether it’s religious leaders, or someone in the community that’s been a service provider.”
The messengers, she continued, should address misinformation that is circulating about the vaccines — that they contain metals, for example, or fetal tissue. (They don’t.) And the messages should include a bit of “cultural humility.”
“We also need to be upfront, so we can be credible,” Ramirez said. “We know in the past some of our Latino and Black communities have been affected by studies that weren’t the best, right?”
Dealing with vaccine hesitancy, she continued, should be a top priority for the public health community: “We really
need to overcome that to make sure our community knows that the vaccine is safe.”
We’re still in the early stages of the vaccine rollout, and the overarching problem that has bedeviled the effort in Texas, as well as the nation as a whole, is that demand for the COVID vaccine far outstrips supply. In Texas so far, 8.9 percent of the population has been vaccinated with at least one dose.
But the state’s rollout is also suffering from a pronounced lack of equity. Data from the Department of State Health Services, while incomplete, suggests pronounced disparities in vaccination rates for Black and Latino Texans (who account for 4.25 percent and 10.82 percent of recipients, respectively). Those figures are out of kilter with the state's overall demographics as well as its COVID infection and mortality rates. Nearly half of the Texans killed by the virus over the past year, for example, were Latino.
It would be wrong to chalk up these disparities simply to vaccine hesitancy among communities of color, of course. Rather, the pandemic has vivified longstanding inequities that also help explain the disproportionate impact of the virus on those communities.
A real issue
Still, vaccine hesitancy is a real issue, according to state and national surveys. And now is the time to tackle it, according to Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who last week announced a new multimedia campaign, focused on communities of color, encouraging residents to get the vaccine. Ads for the “Stay Smart, Do Your Part” campaign will be distributed on television and radio as well as print, in English, Spanish and Vietnamese.
“As county judge, it’s my role to look ahead to the challenges that are going to be around the corner,” Hidalgo said at a Thursday press conference announcing the campaign. “If you look around the corner, past the current stories about limited vaccine supply, you’ll see evidence that despite very high demand for vaccines at the moment, there is a significant and problematic percentage of the community that is hesitant or unwilling to receive the vaccine.”
And that’s a problem for everyone, Hidalgo noted: “Harris County will never be able to reach herd immunity if 40 percent of our residents don’t get vaccinated.”
Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia seconds Hidalgo’s opinion that now is the time to address the issue squarely. “We need to make the case from the get-go that the vaccine is safe to use, and it is important for everyone to know that before conspiracy theories become more prevalent.”
City launches program
The city of Houston also has launched a campaign promoting COVID-19 vaccines. And on Saturday, Mayor Sylvester Turner argued that the issue of vaccine hesitancy is inseparable from the issue of equity in vaccine distribution in the first place.
Speaking at the Settegast community health center in northeast Harris County, Turner called on state leaders to allocate a greater number of vaccines to Harris Health System and the Houston Health Department. Both provide vaccines to community health centers such as Settegast, which primarily serve people of color.
“That’s how we address the disparity — getting into these communities,” Turner said. “And, let me tell you, that’s how you address the vaccine hesitancy, because when neighbors see and family members see that neighbors and family members are getting the vaccine, they’re not going to want to be left out.”
Conversely, he continued, an ongoing shortfall of vaccine availability among communities of color could leave people skeptical — or, at least, not convinced of the urgency: “As long as the disparity is so great, then people are going to wonder.”
The White House on Tuesday announced that it will begin sending shipments of the vaccine directly to federally qualified community health centers across the nation, in part to improve equity in the distribution process. The Biden administration will also increase the number of doses it sends each week to the states — 11 million each week, up from 8.6 million.
That’s good news. Increasing the available supply of the vaccine is a matter of urgency as we aim to get the pandemic under control, even with new, highly transmissible coronavirus variants circulating in the community. But it’s also essential that leaders at all levels of government, including in Austin, do their part to build confidence in vaccines that may mean the difference between life and death for thousands of Texans.