Vaccine demand is waning. Is doubt to blame?

Thousands of appointments are left open as Florida residents question shot safety

Three days after federal health officials recommended a “pause” in use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, Father José Rodríguez began to see the fallout he’d feared. In his east Orange County neighborhood, where the Episcopal priest had worked for months to persuade the largely Latino population to get vaccinated, residents due for their second dose of Moderna were backing out.

“The clients were telling our workers, ‘It isn’t safe,’ even though it was a different vaccine,” said Rodríguez, who leads Iglesia Episcopal Jesús de Nazaret in Azalea Park. “This pause needed a robust, multicultural, multi-lingual approach to communicate the right message. This pause should have been celebrated as the government fulfilling its promise to keep us all safe.”

Instead, the week after the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the pause, Central Florida community leaders and health officials are sounding the alarm that demand for all COVID vaccinations is waning. Thousands of appointments are still open this week in Orange and Seminole counties, and Lake and Volusia counties are drawing fewer residents to their mass vaccinations sites.

Unlike the last time demand lagged in mid-March, all adults are now eligible for the vaccine, along with 16- and 17-yearolds getting the Pfizer shot.

But Florida is still only halfway to herd immunity — when enough people have antibodies to COVID-19 that the virus stops spreading easily through the community. About 38% of the state’s residents having received at least one dose of a vaccine, which, according to the CDC, puts Florida in 30th place among states.

“We were hoping to be in the 50 to 60 percentiles of the eligible population [before a slowdown hit],” said Alan Harris, the emergency management director in Seminole County, where about 40% of eligible people are vaccinated.

Seminole officials dispatched its mobile clinic this week with not every appointment booked — the first time that’s happened since vaccine distribution began, Harris said. At the Oviedo Mall, more than 1,000 appointments were open between Wednesday and Saturday, also the first time slots were available for the same week, he said.

In Orange County, where just last month 7,000 appointments were filled within 15 minutes, more than half of 17,000 vaccination appointments were still available by Monday evening, days after the portal opened.

Mayor Jerry Demings said the county had 11,000 left for the remainder of the week, and the county had vaccinated only about 30% of its residents.

“If you want to get vaccinated at the [Orange County] Convention Center, you have ample opportunity this week,” Demings said, adding that there are 120 different places to get the vaccine in the county.

In Lake County, officials said that while their site at the Lake Square Mall is still busy, demand has dropped from an average of 2,300 people a day to 1,500 a day.

In some cases, said emergency manager Tommy Carpenter, people are booking appointments and then canceling them when they can get the vaccine at a private pharmacy closer to their home.

“We’re taking walkups now, which you couldn’t do before. You’d get overrun,” he said.

It’s unclear how much of the slowdown can be traced to the Johnson & Johnson pause, recommended after six women developed extremely rare but serious blood clots after receiving the vaccine. One died.

Instead, waning demand may have been inevitable, some say.

“I think what’s happening is that we’ve kind of reached the threshold of people who were actively interested in getting a vaccine,” said Volusia County spokesperson Kate Sark. “And now we have individuals who don’t want one or have that vaccine hesitancy.”

A few days before the Johnson & Johnson recommendation, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services projected hesitancy for each county in the nation using survey and Census data. The prediction: Central Florida will struggle to reach herd immunity.

The agency predicts 20% of Orange and Osceola residents will be hesitant, while 19% of Lake and 18% of Seminole will be hesitant.

Alvina Chu, the epidemiology program manager for the Florida Department of Health in Orange County, said health officials can combat hesitancy with education.

“The best we can do is try to get the good information out there that the remaining vaccines we’re still using right now are really great and effective at preventing severe hospitalization and death,” she said.

In Osceola County, for instance, officials are working with the National Institutes of Health to tailor educational campaigns to Hispanic and Black communities. But that effort initially relied on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because it only required a single shot.

“We do think that vaccine is a good option for the people that we serve,” said Mary Lee Downey, CEO of the nonprofit Hope Partnership (previously the Community Hope Center) in Kissimmee, which helps families living in poverty and homelessness. “For me, personally, my birth control had more issues of blood clotting than the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and I took that for 20 years . ... So I do hope we’ll be able to use it again. I think people can make an educated decision about whether it’s right for them.”

Father Rodríguez also hopes to see guidelines for the safe resumption of the vaccine. Federal officials meet again Friday, and a decision is considered likely.

“We marketed this vaccine to a working-class community by saying it’s one and done, which is a powerful message when people were struggling to get one appointment, let alone two,” he said. “But I think this blood clot decision should show people that the government is willing to pause a billion- or trillion-dollar operation because six people had blood clots out of 6.8 million. That should show them that every life matters.”