Some Jackson Health employees want to wait before being vaccinated

As a handful of Florida hospitals prepare to receive a COVID-19 vaccine by Pfizer nearing emergency federal approval, about half of the workforce at one of them — Miami-Dade County’s public-hospital network — said they would be interested in receiving a shot in the next several weeks, according to a poll conducted by the health system last week.

Jackson Health System’s internal survey drew 5,906 respondents, about half of the organization’s employees. The question: “Would you receive the COVID-19 vaccine once available in the first round (potentially in mid-December 2020 or early 2021)?”

Just under half the respondents, or 49.4%, said they would be interested, while 35.7% said they are not interested in this round but would consider in the future. The rest, 14.9%, said they were not interested in a COVID-19 vaccine at all.

Dr. David Woolsey, who has worked in Jackson Memorial Hospital’s emergency department for 30 years, was an emphatic yes. The South Florida native is approaching 60 years old, and said his personal view from weighing the available data about the Pfizer vaccine is that the risk of side effects is minimal.

“The risk of me not taking it and getting COVID and dying from COVID, especially where I work, is not huge, but it’s measurable,” Woolsey said. “I think I’m way better off taking it than not taking it, but that’s just me.”

The lukewarm response to vaccine among other employees has implications for how widely the doses could be distributed in the first phase, where two local hospitals — Jackson and Memorial Health System in Broward County — are set to receive tens of thousands of doses in days.

Once those hospital systems distribute the vaccine among their own employees, they would then help healthcare workers from other hospitals get inoculated, though the logistics of how that would happen are still unclear.

CAUTION SHOULDN’T BE CRITICIZED

Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that Jackson Health was doing the right thing to address vaccine hesitancy by polling its workforce and hearing their concerns.

She added that the 35% of respondents who said they might be interested in being vaccinated at a later date shouldn’t necessarily be discounted as people who are unlikely to take the vaccine.

“That’s a reasonable position to take in that these are new vaccines and new technologies,” Schoch-Spana said.

Though safety and efficacy data have been overwhelmingly positive, especially for the Pfizer vaccine heading to Jackson, Schoch-Spana said the vaccine hasn’t yet been given to enough people — millions as opposed to tens of thousands — to fully understand the more rare side effects, so some degree of hesitancy is to be expected.

Schoch-Spana, the

Johns Hopkins researcher, said that while it might be expected that healthcare workers would be more open to vaccination than the general public that has not always been the case.

She raised the example of a smallpox vaccination campaign in 2003, which she said did not have a high level of uptake in healthcare workers for many reasons, but one was that they didn’t understand the purpose of the vaccination campaign and they didn’t feel adequately consulted.

As for her own research, Schoch-Spana said that the public’s willingness to take an early-stage COVID-19 vaccine waned from May to September but has been ticking up since then.

“So that half [at Jackson] are saying yes is an excellent thing, and that 35% are saying maybe later is still positive,” she said.