RUpali Limaye received her first dose of Covid-19 vaccine a few weeks ago. “I bowed,” she admitted without giving a little embarrassment.
It so happens that Limaye is a firm proponent of vaccination; she works at the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins University. But her reaction is not uncommon. Talk to anyone who works in Covid vaccination clinics or as a volunteer, and you will hear stories about the joy, the relief, the shedding of the cloak of fear that has plagued people in our difficult period of pandemic isolation.
“I do not think many people before Covid felt grateful for vaccines,” Ruth Karron, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Immunization Research, told STAT. “I think it’s a reset.”
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Vaccination – long seen as a task or a rather-not-want-to-be, or for many adults a completely forgotten part of preventative health care, seems to have a moment.
Not since the development of polio vaccine in the mid – fifties, when insane parents stood in line with their children to get the preventive vaccinations of Jonas Salk, vaccines have been seen in such a favorable light. More than six decades later, relatively few people today have first-hand memories of that time, Karron noted.
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The question is whether the newfound embrace of vaccines will translate into something more. Vaccination of adults against other diseases, for example, has long led to the success of childhood efforts. Will some people reconsider the importance of vaccinations in general?
“I was always amazed at how many parents could split the vaccination of children and vaccination for adults,” said Alison Buttenheim, an associate professor of nursing and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania who works on vaccine acceptance. “Parents who are super zealous – like that their child will never miss a dose of something, fully vaccinated, gung-ho – will still say, ‘I never get the flu shot.'”
Still, others are hopeful that there will be more appreciation for vaccines, as Covid-19 vaccinations help lower mortality rates and ease the restrictions at a social distance. For many people, vaccination will result in fundamental changes in their daily lives.
Patsy Stinchfield, a pediatric nurse at Children’s Minnesota in Minneapolis-St. Paul, remember that he recently saw a very anxious man in a long line at a vaccination clinic. Worried about him, she pulled him out of the queue and to the clinic. He told Stinchfield that he had not had so many people in months, and that he felt agoraphobic. He also had a strong fear of needles.
And yet you are here, she said, trying to calm him down. The man explained that he was there because he is a teacher and is desperate to get back into the classroom.
“How we will get out of this is one arm at a time,” Stinchfield said, recalling the encounter.
While it is not clear how long people will associate vaccination with returning to something that approaches normal life, it will certainly be done in the short term. Just last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidelines that, among other things, say that people who are fully vaccinated can now spend time indoors and unmasked. Vaccination that has been vaccinated has been given the green light to visit harmless children and grandchildren as long as they are not in danger of becoming serious.
“If anyone can legally say, ‘I owe it to my family to embrace this, and I will not forget it,'” Brian Southwell, senior director of public sphere science at RTI International, brainstormed research. , said. Triangle Park, NC
Southwell is not sure that appreciation for Covid vaccines – a response to a health crisis – will lead to renewed interest in flu shots or a faster approach to keeping tetanus coverage up to date.
“I think there is a possibility for the vaccine to get a different level of symbolic meaning for people who may not have been there,” he said. But ‘it’s an open question whether it spills over into the broader domain of vaccination for all kinds of diseases … because we’re still talking about a sense of collective solution to something we’ve been through as opposed to, in many cases, where vaccination poses an abstract threat. ‘
Nearly 70 million Americans have received at least one dose of Covid vaccine, and 11% of the population has been fully vaccinated at this point. (For the vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, fully vaccinated means two doses per person. For the most recently approved vaccine, made by Johnson & Johnson, only one dose is required.)
Demand still exceeds supply and will be in the United States for a few more weeks. Limaye, director of behavioral and implementation science at the International Vaccine Access Center, said times of scarcity actually increase the demand for a product. The balance is expected to decline later in the spring, and then the focus of the vaccination effort will shift to reluctant people hiding behind the eager crowd.
Heidi Larson, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project and a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the time spent on those still concerned about Covid vaccines would bear fruit, and not just what the acceptance of these vaccines.
“I think what’s really important here is building trust,” Larson said. ‘I think this is where it’s really important to use strategies that are not necessarily specific to vaccines; it’s more about overall relationship building … It’s definitely going to have a positive effect, regardless of the vaccine. ‘
Acceptance can be accepted. Larson said she was recently involved in a roundtable meeting with officials from a number of African countries, noting that the news about Americans lying about access to Covid vaccines is creating demand for products in their own countries.
Opinion polls in this country show that the reluctance to take Covid vaccines – which have been developed at unprecedented speeds – has decreased as clinical trials have shown that the vaccines are extremely effective, Limaye said. And with the number of doses administered worldwide and on top of that 350 million, the safety profile of these vaccines looks exceptionally good.
“The fact that these people were rolled out over time enabled the people to get comfort with the process and with the vaccines,” Karron said of the people who initially indicated they wanted to wait a while before they are vaccinated, the “to Dr. Fauci, to the first million … to my pastor’s people.
The fact that these vaccines are so much a part of the public discourse these days could potentially also benefit from the acceptance of vaccines, experts said. Many people are so familiar with the properties of different vaccines that they have opinions about what they want to receive.
Virtually no one who gets a flu shot or a tetanus shot knows who made it.
People have seen in real time how vaccines are being developed, tested and approved for use. Thousands of people watched the meeting of the Food and Drug Administration’s Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Related Biological Products as it reviewed the data on the first vaccine to receive emergency authorization, made by Pfizer and BioNTech. When the Immunization Practices Advisory Committee, an expert panel that makes policy recommendations to the CDC, met on December 1 to vote on who should be at the forefront of Covid vaccines, 32,000 computers flooded the meeting at one point.
“People had a window in the process,” Karron said. ‘And what I said is that if we get it right, it can increase people’s confidence in the process. And if we misunderstand it, it reduces people’s confidence in vaccines. ”
Buttenheim said that in the future, pediatricians will probably have to brush up on their discussions about why parents should vaccinate their children, because parents may be armed with questions about things like the vaccination platforms – the mechanisms, such as messenger RNA or viral vectors, that deliver vaccines. used to elicit an immune response – used in the various vaccines in the pediatric vaccination schedule.
‘It could be that [with] people’s literacy … or their interest in having new opportunities to sell the safety and effectiveness of our childhood schedule in ways we did not have before, ”she said.
In terms of vaccination of adults, Covid vaccine can help people get into the habit of being vaccinated – especially if it seems that boost shots are needed to deal with the coronavirus variant that occurs.
‘Yes, there will be people whose appreciation for vaccines is so strengthened that it can generally lead them to be vaccinated [for other things] in countries where it is easy to do, ”says Julie Leask, a professor at the University of Sydney’s School of Nursing and Obstetrics who accepts in the field of vaccination. However, Leask was not sure if it would lead to improved vaccination rates in children.
Karron believes favorable public discussion about vaccines can help overcome the negative messages of the anti-vaccination community. Anti-vaxxers had fierce and vocal champions, but outside of public health officials, there were less passionate voices against pro-vaccine.
‘The people who cry [for vaccine] now, who have generally been vaccinated in a lukewarm way, they could be champions, ‘she said. “And it can make a difference.”