Rupali Limaye received his first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine a few weeks ago. “I screamed,” she admitted without any sign of embarrassment.
It turns out that Limaye is a staunch advocate of vaccination; she works at the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins University. But his reaction is not uncommon. Talk to anyone who works or volunteers at Covid’s vaccination clinics and you will hear stories about the joy, the relief, the shedding of the blanket of dread that weighed on people during our difficult period of pandemic isolation.
“I don’t think many people were grateful for the vaccines before Covid,” said Ruth Karron, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Immunization Research, to STAT. “I think it’s a reset.”
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It seems that vaccination – long seen as a chore or a “I prefer not to” or, for many adults, a completely overlooked part of preventive health care – is having a moment.
Since the polio vaccine was launched in the mid-1950s, when frantic parents lined up with their children to get preventive inoculations from Jonas Salk, vaccines were not 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 adoption of vaccines will translate into anything else. Vaccination of adults against other diseases has long been behind the success of children’s efforts, for example. Will some people reconsider the importance of vaccines in general?
“I was always surprised at how well parents were able to compartmentalize childhood vaccination and adult vaccination,” said Alison Buttenheim, associate professor of nursing and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania who works with vaccine acceptance. “Parents who are super-discreet – as if their children never miss a dose of anything, fully vaccinated, enthusiastic – would still say, ‘I never get the flu shot.'”
Still, others are hopeful there will be a greater appreciation of vaccines across the board, now that Covid-19 vaccines are helping to reduce mortality rates and ease restrictions on social distance. For many people, vaccination will result in fundamental changes in their daily lives.
Patsy Stinchfield, pediatric nurse at Children’s Minnesota in Minneapolis-St. Paul, remembered seeing a very anxious man in a long line at a vaccination clinic recently. Worried about him, she took him off the line and took him to the clinic. He told Stinchfield that he hadn’t been with so many people in months and that he had agoraphobia. He was also very afraid of needles.
And yet you’re here, she said, trying to calm him down. The man explained that he was there because he is a teacher and is desperate to return to the classroom.
“How we are going to get out of this is one arm at a time,” said Stinchfield, recalling the meeting.
While it is not clear how long people will associate vaccination with a return to something close to normal life, they will certainly do so in the short term. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released guidelines that, among other things, said that people who have been fully vaccinated can now spend time together indoors and without a mask. Vaccinated grandparents were given the green light to visit unvaccinated children and grandchildren, as long as they were not at risk of severe Covid.
“Legitimately, someone could say, ‘I should be able to hug my family to this and I won’t forget that,'” said Brian Southwell, senior director of public science at RTI International, a think tank located in Research Triangle Park, NC
Southwell is not sure that appreciation for Covid vaccines – a response to a health crisis – will translate into a renewed interest in flu vaccines or a more meticulous approach to keeping anti-tetanus coverage up-to-date.
“I think there is potential for the act of vaccination to take on a different symbolic level of meaning for people who might not exist,” he said. But “it is an open question whether it spills over into the broader domain of vaccination for all types of diseases … because, again, we are still talking about some sense of collective remedy for something we have been going through, rather than in many cases, where vaccination is a prevention of an abstract threat. “
Nearly 70 million Americans have received at least one dose of the Covid vaccine and 11% of the population is fully vaccinated at this time. (For 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 needed.)
Demand still exceeds supply, and will exceed it, for a few weeks in the United States. Scarcity times really increase demand for a product, noted Limaye, who is director of behavioral and implementation science at the International Vaccine Access Center. The balance is expected to unbalance in late spring, at which point the focus of the vaccination effort will shift to the hesitant people who have hidden behind the anxious crowd.
Heidi Larson, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project and professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that the time now spent on reaching those who are still concerned about Covid’s vaccines will be worth it, and not just in terms of accepting these. vaccines.
“I think what’s really important here is building trust,” said Larson. “I think this is where it is really important to use strategies that are not necessarily specific to the vaccine, but rather to build a general relationship…. This will have a positive knock-on effect, for sure, whatever the vaccine is. “
Acceptance can generate acceptance. Larson said she was recently involved in a roundtable discussion with officials from several African countries, who noted that news of Americans vying for access to Covid’s vaccines is creating demand for the products in their own countries.
Public opinion polls in this country show that the reluctance to take Covid vaccines – which were developed with unprecedented speed – has eased, as clinical tests have shown that vaccines are highly effective, said Limaye. And with the number of doses administered worldwide reaching 350 million, the safety profile of these vaccines looks exceptionally good.
“This implantation over time has allowed these people to feel comfortable with the process and with the vaccines,” said Karron of the people who initially indicated that they wanted to wait a little while before being vaccinated, “after Dr. Fauci, then the first million … after my pastor “personal.
The fact that these vaccines make up a large part of public discourse these days may also be a game in favor of accepting the vaccine in the future, experts said. Many people are so familiar with the attributes of various vaccines that they have opinions about what they want to receive.
Virtually no one who gets a flu or tetanus vaccine knows who did it.
People saw, in real time, how vaccines are developed, tested and approved for use. Thousands of people attended the meeting streamed from the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee meeting, which evaluated data from the first vaccine to obtain an emergency use authorization, the one made by Pfizer and BioNTech. When the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a panel of experts who make policy recommendations to the CDC, met on December 1 to vote on who should be at the front of the Covid vaccine queue, 32,000 computers were broadcasting the meeting at one point.
“People had a window into the process,” said Karron. “And what I’ve been saying is that, if we get it right, it can increase people’s faith in the process in general. And if we get it wrong, it will diminish people’s faith in vaccines. ”
Buttenheim said that pediatricians will likely need to improve their discussion points about why parents should vaccinate their children, because parents may come armed with questions about things like vaccine platforms – the mechanisms, like messenger RNA or viral vectors, that vaccines use to induce an immune response – used in the various vaccines in the childhood vaccination scheme.
“It could be that [with] the literacy of people … or their interest, that we have new opportunities to sell the safety and effectiveness of our children’s programming in ways we didn’t have, ”she said.
In terms of vaccinating adults, the Covid vaccine can help to create the habit of vaccinating people – especially if booster vaccines are needed to deal with emerging coronavirus variants.
“Yes, there will be some people whose appreciation for vaccines is so high that it really takes them along the way to be vaccinated [for other things] in countries where this is easy to do, ”said Julie Leask, a professor at the University of Sydney School of Nursing and Midwifery who works in the field of vaccine acceptance. Leask was not sure, however, whether this would be reflected in better childhood vaccination rates.
Karron believes that a favorable public discussion about vaccines could help overcome the negative message from the anti-vaccination community. The antivaxxers had fierce and vocal champions, but outside public health officials, there were fewer passionately pro-vaccine voices.
“People who are crying [for vaccine] now, who were generally pro-vaccine, in a lukewarm way … these could be champions, ”she said. “And it can make a difference.”