Vaccination rates in the Three Rivers Health District have significantly increased over the past couple of weeks, but Dr. Richard Williams of the Three Rivers Health District said even higher rates are needed to stop the surge of COVID-19 cases.
After the initial deluge of people who were eager to get vaccinated once COVID-19 vaccines were first approved, vaccination rates had dropped to about 200 or 300 a week in the district, said Williams. When people started hearing about the Delta variant’s higher transmissibility rate and impact on younger populations, vaccination rates began to pick up, and now they’re up to around 1,500 shots in arms per week.
“It’s tied to people understanding they’re in a dangerous situation, that the virus poses a personal risk to them,” said Williams. “We’re in an extremely dangerous period.”
In the early days of the pandemic, he said, victims were primarily the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions that made them vulnerable. Those people rushed to get the vaccine, and now around 80 percent of that group is now vaccinated. Although younger people were also getting the virus and becoming very ill, the numbers were low, he said, leading to the perception that younger people weren’t susceptible to COVID.
Williams said he and his team at Three Rivers are still seeing vaccine resistance in all forms, and they’re trying hard to help people understand the benefits of the vaccine and the threats to them if they aren’t vaccinated.
“The Delta variant is behaving very differently than the original virus or previous variants,” he said. “It’s for sure a lot more contagious, with 1,000 or more times the amount of viral load going into the environment, with the chance of exposure greater.”
The Delta variant accounts for the spikes across the U.S., especially in some southern states, where there are increasing hospitalizations of younger people and children, said Williams. If unchecked, the virus could “spin off yet another mutation” and become even more contagious, and possibly even resistant to the vaccine.
“That’s the worst of both worlds,” he said. “In the grand scheme of things, the risks from the vaccine are very, very tiny, while dozens of bad things can happen from the virus, and the risk is much higher. There’s no comparison, really … This is dangerous for everybody. If it can evade our immunity, it can continue at pandemic levels.”
While Williams said there has always been a tiny portion of the population that objects to all vaccinations, the only time he ever encountered vaccine resistance unrelated to those general objections was as a military doctor during the Gulf War, when soldiers were required to get vaccinated against anthrax with an experimental vaccine. The difference then, he said, was that, while there was a credible threat that “the other side” had anthrax and could use it as a weapon, the threat was theoretical.
“We weren’t actually seeing any cases of anthrax,” he said. “There was a lot of angst, but still not very many were dead set against it because they knew there was a threat.”
Williams said he had never before seen such widespread refusal of a vaccine where people had such an easy way to protect themselves against the chance of serious illness or hospitalizations from a powerful pathogen. He pointed out that the vaccine cuts the chances of serious illness or hospitalization down to just two or three percent at most, and that 98 percent of the people who are getting ill are not vaccinated.
Vaccine hesitancy takes several forms, said Williams, all the way from people who are uneasy about taking it because it’s not FDA-approved (as opposed to authorized by the FDA on an emergency basis, which it is), to people who don’t trust the government, to people who are opposed to vaccines on belief.
Williams said he and his team engage people every day to try to reassure them about the safety of the vaccine, launching an effort among communities of color, reaching out to community leaders, board members, health care systems, and others. They’ve engaged in discussions with people who object to the vaccine, sometimes changing minds, sometimes not. They even considered a door-to-door campaign, he said, but were told by community leaders that there are people who don’t want anyone coming on their private property.
“So, we haven’t gone door-to-door out of respect for strong dissidents,” he said.
People who are against being vaccinated find many ways to rationalize their objections “to make the world fit their beliefs,” said Williams. The only thing he and his team can do, he said, is to continue presenting “ground truth,” or proof of what the virus and the vaccine actually do, to keep providing that information to the public, and to make the vaccine readily available on a daily basis.
Williams said it all comes down to fear.
“If somebody’s hardcore, they’re not going to get the vaccine,” he said. “But if you fear the virus more than the vaccine, at the end of the day, you’ll choose the vaccine.”