Syracuse, NY – New York opened its gates wide on Tuesday for all New York adults to get Covid-19 vaccines, but tens of thousands of local appointments remain unused.
The state-owned premises at the fair still have more than 1,000 slots per day filled from April 27 to May 31, the last day for which appointments are available. Onondaga County’s vaccination website is taking in new appointments. You can report to Walgreens and Wegman’s for vaccinations next week.
As the demand for the vaccine begins to exceed the demand, public health experts say we need to change our approach: rather than bringing people to the vaccine, we need to bring the vaccine among the people.
“Instead of just opening it up, we need to pursue a more active vaccine strategy,” said Brittany Kmush, a professor of public health and epidemiologist infectious diseases at Syracuse University. “We need to reach out to people who have transportation issues, who do not know they can get an appointment, who need to work or have problems with child care.”
The experts say that the mass vaccination sites, such as the fair, gave the beginning of the vaccination to the public, but now we are past the first wave of people who were motivated and could get the vaccines. Those mass sites will not reach us up to the 60-85% needed for herd immunity, when the virus is difficult to spread because many people are immune.
“We may have the fair open for the rest of the century, but if you do not have a car, do not go there,” said Brian Leydet, an epidemiologist and professor of infectious diseases at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, said. “If you park a bus in their neighborhood, they can walk while the pasta is on the stove, get a chance and go back and finish dinner.”
What needs to happen now, they say, is a census-by-census-channel offensive targeting low-vaccination rates and targeting the sprayers to those neighborhoods. It is labor intensive, but it works, said David Larsen, a professor of public health and epidemiologist. That means going through the data to find neighborhoods with low vaccination rates, flooding it with information and encouragement, and deploying mobile pickups and knocking on doors.
This is how polio vaccines are administered in the few countries where the disease still exists, he said, and how residents in malaria zones are encouraged to use insecticides to control mosquitoes.
“This is what I would consider the hard work of public health to get the vaccine into the people,” Larsen said. “The best way to do that is to take it to the people.”
It’s a race against time, as new cases of coronavirus are still climbing in New York State, and the more contagious variant, especially the one first discovered in the UK, is becoming the dominant strain.
The state of New York reaches out to SUNY campuses and offers all students the one-time vaccines Johnson & Johnson before the summer break. The state also set up pop-up clinics in New York City with low vaccination rates.
Onondaga County, where about 40% of the population got their shots, is taking syringes to the streets. The province held pop-up clinics at churches and public housing. McMahon sends part of the country’s vaccine supply to SU and joins Le Moyne College to vaccinate students on campus. (More than three-quarters of the new cases are in young people, McMahon said.)
He also plans to turn the country’s mobile Covid-19 testing laboratory into a mobile Covid-19 vaccination site. And the province plans to set up vaccination clinics in high schools as early as this week, now that someone 16 years and older can get the Pfizer vaccine. Moderna and Johnson & Johnson are approved for 18 and older.
Persuading people to get the vaccine would be another obstacle to public health. About 20% of American adults say according to the analysis of national polls by the voting website FiveThirtyEight, they will definitely or probably not get the vaccine.
Polls show slightly greater hesitation against the vaccine among blacks and evangelists among other groups. The demographic group that would most likely say they would not be vaccinated were Republican men. Nearly half of them said they did not intend to get the vaccine, according to a Marist NPR poll conducted in mid-March, compared to 6% of Democratic men.
Carrying vaccines door to door and trying to convince the vaccine-hesitant on the go is a time-consuming process compared to the efficient assembly line of a mass clinic. It is also complicated by the need to monitor someone who gets a chance for 15 minutes to make sure they do not have a severe allergic reaction. But this is the one that will ultimately help us control the pandemic, Larsen said.
The key to getting more vaccines in the arms is to reduce barriers and make the vaccines convenient for everyone, Leydet said.
“You have students who say, ‘I do not want to go to the fair or the OnCenter, but I will go to the (campus) health center to get a chance,'” he said. “Ease of access is important.”
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