See The Bigger Picture

 

Is it possible that those of us who have been publicly and privately pleading for people to protect themselves and others from a global pandemic virus by wearing face masks and getting vaccinated have been barking up the wrong tree?

Aside from people who flat-out deny the wisdom of getting a vaccine to prevent a life-changing and life-threatening disease like COVID-19, Joyce Frieden found other reasons why folks have balked:

“Our nation’s unvaccinated are not a monstrous monolith,” [pediatrician Rhea] Boyd said. “This is not a group who is adverse to science, or medical care. We have seen that this is a group who is more likely to be our nation’s working poor; they’re more likely to lack the resources to actually access any type of healthcare, let alone a vaccination. And so if we’re going to vaccinate them, we have to talk about what we’re going to do to address access barriers both to the vaccines and other types of medical care, but also to information about vaccines.”

 

Frieden exposes evidence that vaccine distribution has been very uneven across the country, “worse in southern states, which is also where more Black and Latinx people live.”

When vaccines do get through, access to vaccine sites and clinics is not equal across the country. It’s not like there is a pharmacy or doctor’s office around every corner, particularly in rural areas. And getting out and about to get one can be expensive for many folks:

Boyd noted that CDC data released Monday showed that a smaller percentage of Black and Latinx individuals in the U.S. have been fully vaccinated compared with whites. One barrier for many of these unvaccinated people is cost: although they know that the vaccine itself is free, “getting to that vaccination site requires gas in your tank, it requires bus fare. It might require a parking fee if you go to a public site in the community,” she said. “Getting to and from healthcare always costs money, and that is a concern for people who are low-income, and we’ve seen that people who are low-income are more likely to be disproportionately unvaccinated.”

 

If people who are having difficulty making ends meet can’t afford to take a day off of work to get a vaccine, we can’t expect them to take off another day or two in order to recover from potential vaccine side effects, such as fever, headache, fatigue, and body aches:

Taking time off of work is another barrier, especially when it comes to getting children vaccinated, she continued; one poll found that 25% of all parents who had unvaccinated children, ages 12 to 17, said they would be more likely to get their children vaccinated if they were given paid time off to do so, she said. They would also be more likely to get vaccinated themselves “if their medical provider could come to their workplace to do it,” Boyd added.

 

Dissemination of factual information about health doesn’t happen equally around the country either, Frieden discovered. As a result, the “health literacy gap” which has existed in America for a long time has only widened during the pandemic:

“People who have access to resources and healthcare tend to have access to credible information about health, and other communities do not. On top of that information gap, we are obviously also facing a disinformation campaign that’s been targeting communities of color, particularly Black folks, since the beginning of the vaccine rollout.”

 

Mandated vaccinations in the workplace might encourage more people to get vaccinated. Larger financial incentives to get a jab might also be effective in upping vaccination rates. There are other potential solutions:

For instance, “we need to talk about universal healthcare, so that the cost of vaccination truly is free for folks,” she continued. “We need to talk about paid sick leave …We need to acknowledge that disinformation is rarely behind a paywall, but credible science often is, and so we need to make sure that — particularly around COVID and health in general — that we provide free access to everybody to have that information online and in their community.”

 

Maybe it’s time to see the bigger picture and stop obsessing about vaccine hesitancy and the behavior of anti-vaxxers:

Boyd also urged people to stop using the term “vaccine hesitancy.” “People don’t have a kind of amorphous hesitation or reluctance to get vaccinated or to receive medical care,” she said. “Most of those who are unvaccinated in our country are not ‘anti-vaxxers’ — that is a tiny minority of the folks who are unvaccinated.” Many of the unvaccinated are actually children, which “obviously blows open the idea that the folks who are unvaccinated just hate medical care and vaccines. So if we’re not going to talk about hesitancy, it means you have to do the extra work to actually understand why folks aren’t vaccinated.”

 

Maybe that extra work will result in more vaccines in people’s arms.

 

(Google Images)

 

source http://www.thepediablog.com/2021/09/15/see-the-bigger-picture/