For VA, where veterans live, a bigger factor in refusing COVID vaccine than breed

Veterans affairs officials said they see some groups of veterans rejecting opportunities to get the coronavirus vaccine, but it is not necessarily the individuals they expected to convince problems.

“In color communities, we actually surpass more than we are in the white population of America,” said Dr. Richard Stone, acting head of the Veterans Health Administration, said in testimony before the Home Compensation Committee on Friday. “I am very pleased with how black and Spanish veterans are accepting the vaccine.”

Health officials have been warning for months that the belief of minority groups across the country about the two-shot coronavirus vaccine could pose a special challenge. A recent report by the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, which seeks to find out why Blacks are less likely to take the vaccine, found that several factors played a role in the lack of confidence.

“Between mistrust, misinformation and COVID management that has not always protected the most vulnerable (think of unfair grants and vaccination sites), how surprising is it then that black communities accept less vaccination?” ask the authors of the study. A December Associated Press poll found that only 24 percent of black Americans and 34 percent of Hispanics were planning to get the vaccine, as opposed to 53 percent of white Americans.

But Stone said VA fortunately did not see the predicted problem. Instead, it appears that the most reluctant groups so far are rural veterans, who may already have significant challenges with access to health care and the availability of vaccines.

In one area of ​​New York alone, more than 1,000 veterans over the age of 75 said ‘no thank you.’ And that surprised us, “he said.

Cameron Matthews, assistant secretary of health at VA, said officials had begun gathering focus groups on the reasons behind the vaccine hesitation because “our rural population in all age groups is showing differences that we should definitely address.”

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The department has been administering about 2 million doses of vaccines since mid-December. In some places, almost all high-risk VA staff and veteran patients completed the two-dose treatment.

But Stone said the vaccines to veterans in rural areas are still a ‘hard effort’, especially since the initial version of the vaccine requires sub-cooled temperatures to store it.

“It was difficult,” he said. ” Our rural veterans are not doing as well and reaching us as we would like. ‘

Members of Congress have speculated that the problem with lower acceptance of vaccines in rural areas may not be related to mistrust, but rather to travel issues.

Even as mobile veterans centers have helped push the total from VA to more than 300 distribution sites across the country, it can be an hour-long ride for veterans, many of whom are elderly, to appoint a vaccine.

Stone promises further research and improvements in the coming weeks. The department expects to distribute vaccines to nearly 7 million individuals in the coming months, covering nearly every veteran who is an active user of VA health services.

However, lawmakers have expressed concern that other veterans who do not regularly use VA medical care but do not have access to the vaccines elsewhere. Stone said decisions on that would be left to the availability of vaccines.

“Our ability to reach this veteran population is entirely based on supply,” he said. “Our desire is to get the vaccine in as many veterans as possible.”

More than 220,000 patients detected by VA have contracted coronavirus in the past 11 months and more than 10,100 have died from virus-related complications.