They are frontline workers with the highest priority access to the COVID-19 vaccine, but they refuse to take it.
In the St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Tehama County, less than half of the 700 hospital workers eligible for the vaccine were willing to take the shot when it was first offered. At Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, one in five nurses and doctors in the foreground turned down the shot. About 20% to 40% of the LA County front-line workers who were offered the vaccine did the same, according to provincial health officials.
So many frontline workers in Riverside County have refused the vaccine – an estimated 50% – that hospitals and public officials have met to distribute the unused doses, said Kim Saruwatari, director of public health.
Doubts about vaccines circulating among health workers across the country come as a surprise to researchers, who have assumed that hospital staff will be one of those most in line with the scientific data supporting the vaccines.
The scientific evidence is clear regarding the safety and efficacy of the vaccines after trials involving tens of thousands of participants, including the elderly and people with chronic health conditions. The shots are recommended for everyone except those who have had a severe allergic reaction to any ingredient.
Skepticism remains.
April Lu, a 31-year-old nurse from Providence Holy Cross Medical Center, said she did not want to take the vaccine because she was not convinced it was safe for pregnant women. She is six months pregnant.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, clinical trials have yet to be conducted on pregnant women taking the vaccine, but experts believe the vaccine is unlikely to pose a specific risk. The agency says pregnant women can choose to be vaccinated.
‘I choose the risk – the risk of having COVID, or the risk that the vaccine is unknown. I think I choose the risk of COVID. “I can control it and prevent it a bit by wearing masks, although it’s not 100% sure,” Lu said.
Some of her co-workers also refused to take the vaccine because they went months without contracting the virus and believe they have a good chance of surviving it, she said. “I feel people think, ‘I can still make it until it ends without getting the vaccine,'” she said.
The extent to which health workers are refusing the vaccine is unclear, but reports of lower-than-expected participation rates are emerging across the country, raising concerns for epidemiologists who believe the health effects on health could be disastrous.
A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29% of health workers are “hesitant about vaccinations”, a figure that is higher than the percentage of the general population, 27%.
“Even the name, Operation Warp Speed, is causing people concern about the rush to push it through,” said Dr. Medell Briggs-Malonson, a drug at UCLA Health, who received the vaccine, said. Yet she encouraged her colleagues to do the same.
“It’s definitely disappointing,” said Sal Rosselli, president of the National Union of Healthcare Workers. “But it’s not shocking, given what the federal government has been doing for the past ten months. … Trust science. It’s about science, and reality, and what’s right. ”
The consequences are potentially dire: if too few people are vaccinated, the pandemic will stretch indefinitely, leading to future boom, excessive strain on the health care system and ongoing economic downturn.
“Our ability as a society to return to a higher level of functioning depends on protecting as many people as possible,” said Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch.
Respondents from the Kaiser Family Foundation survey, who said they were unlikely to get the vaccine, said they were concerned about side effects; they do not have confidence in the government to ensure that the vaccines are safe; they are concerned about the role of politics in the development of vaccines; or they believe the dangers of COVID-19 are exaggerated.
In online forums, some health workers across the country have expressed frustration over the first time – a status some associate with experimentation.
Nicholas Ruiz, an office assistant at Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, California, said health workers struggle with the same doubts and fears and misinformation about the disease as the public. Although he interacts with nurses treating COVID-19 patients, he does not take it and knows many others who do not.
‘I feel that the public’s perception of health workers is wrong. They may think we are all informed of this. “Maybe they think because we work in this area,” Ruiz said. “But I know there are a lot of people who have the same mentality as the public where they’re still scared to get it.”
In Fresno County, dr. Interim public health official Rais Vohra said on Tuesday that “people who are qualified to get the vaccine are not ready to get it.” Such health workers, including those who are pregnant or want to become pregnant, were reluctant because questions arose about the long-term effects.
To convince reluctant workers, many hospitals use instructional videos and interactive webinars showing staff being vaccinated. At an Orange County hospital, Anthony Wilkinson, an intensive care nurse caring for coronavirus patients, said he had staff who “lost confidence in the big pharmaceutical and even the CDC.”
Wilkinson made a Facebook video about the science behind the vaccine and kept friends and family informed of his progress after receiving it. “People are scared of me. I can understand why. It is new and nobody wants to be the first, ”he said.
The first award of the vaccine made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech, arrived in Tehama County, home to 65,000 people, last week.
Dr. Tehama County Health Officer Richard Wickenheiser said 495 doses were first made available to health workers in St. Louis. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Red Bluff, but the hospital basically returned 200 to us.
“They gave us the vaccines back, and we quickly started taking them out and using them,” Wickenheiser said. “I do not want to be accused of having it in the freezer while we wait for people to decide.”
Zoe Harris, spokeswoman Zoe Harris, selected about 10% of the nursing staff at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco.
As of Tuesday, UCLA Health had vaccinated 7,300 staff members of more than 37,000, although it was not clear how many people were offered the vaccine because the hospital did not release the information. Officials acknowledged that “our vaccine may be delayed.”
‘We do not ask staff to immediately decide whether they will receive the vaccine. We want to give the vaccines offered sufficient time to make a decision, and we hope that staff will continue to understand that the benefits of vaccination clearly outweigh the risks, “the hospital said in a statement.
The uncertainty is shared among nursing home staff, who make up about 35% of the more than 25,000 COVID-19 deaths in California.
But about a quarter of staff members expressed their reluctance to take the vaccine, said managers and employees of nursing homes interviewed by The Times.
“They are afraid of the side effects, they do not know what is going to happen, or whether it will really protect them,” said a licensed occupational nurse at a nursing home in Los Angeles, asking that her name not be used. . she may not speak to the media. “It became so political.”
She was reluctant to take the vaccine herself until the 95-bed facility in which she worked, which had been virus-free for months, was hit by the rapid spread of the community. “We have 16 new cases in just three days,” she said. “It’s so fast we do not even know how it happens.”
“Reluctance? No doubt, there is a lot of reluctance, ”said dr. Michael Wasserman, medical director of the Eisenberg Village Nursing Home in Reseda and former president of the California Assn, said. of Long Term Care Medicine, which represents physicians, nurses and others working in nursing homes.
“Because the federal government had no transparency or clarity, the states and provinces often did not know at the last minute what was happening,” he said. “It makes vaccine reluctance even worse.”
It is unclear what happens if a hospital receives extra doses. State guidance enables hospitals to offer the vaccine to people with a lower priority if front-line workers have already offered the vaccine.
In Tehama County, unused doses at hospitals are distributed to the following eligible groups: staff and residents of help centers and skilled nursing homes.
Meanwhile, the province’s health department is conducting daily telephone conversations about access, said Wickenheiser, the health officer in Tehama County, saying, “The public asks daily, ‘When are we going to get this?'”
Laura Newberry and Jaclyn Cosgrove, staff writers and photojournalist Francine Orr, contributed to this report.