They are frontline workers with priority access to the COVID-19 vaccine, but they refuse to take it.
At St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Tehama County, less than half of the 700 hospital employees eligible for the vaccine were willing to get the vaccine when it was first offered. At Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, one in five first-rate nurses and doctors refused the injection. Approximately 20% to 40% of LA county frontline workers who received the vaccine did the same, according to county public health officials.
So many frontline workers in Riverside County have turned down the vaccine – about 50% – that the hospital and government officials have come together to define the best strategy for distributing unused doses, said Public Health Director Kim Saruwatari.
The doubts about the vaccines that circulate among health professionals across the country surprise the researchers, who assumed that the hospital staff would be among those that are most in line with the scientific data that support the vaccines.
The scientific evidence is clear as to the safety and efficacy of vaccines after trials involving tens of thousands of participants, including the elderly and people with chronic health conditions. Injections are recommended for everyone except those who have had a severe allergic reaction to any of the ingredients.
Still, skepticism remains.
April Lu, a 31-year-old nurse at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center, said she refused to get the vaccine because she is not convinced it is safe for pregnant women. She is six months pregnant.
Clinical trials have not yet been conducted on pregnant women who received the vaccine, but experts believe the vaccine should not pose a specific risk, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The agency says pregnant women can opt for vaccination.
“I am choosing the risk – the risk of having COVID, or the risk of the vaccine unknown. I think I am choosing the COVID risk. I can control and prevent a little bit using masks, although not 100% for sure, ”said Lu.
Some of her co-workers also refused to take the vaccine because they had not contracted the virus for months and believed they had a good chance of surviving, she said. “I feel like people think, ‘I can still survive to the end without getting the vaccine,'” she said.
The extent to which health professionals are refusing the vaccine is unclear, but reports of lower than expected participation rates are emerging across the country, raising concerns for epidemiologists who say the public health implications can be disastrous.
A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29% of health professionals were “hesitant about the vaccine”, a number slightly higher than the percentage of the general population, 27%.
“Even the name, Operation Warp Speed, attracts some concern to people about the rush to push it,” said Dr. Medell Briggs-Malonson, an emergency doctor at UCLA Health who received the vaccine. Still, she encouraged her colleagues to do the same.
“It is certainly disappointing,” said Sal Rosselli, president of the National Health Workers Union. “But it is not shocking, given what the federal government has done in the past 10 months. … Trust science. It is about science, reality and what is right ”.
The consequences are potentially dire: if few people are vaccinated, the pandemic will spread indefinitely, leading to future outbreaks, excessive pressure on the health system and ongoing economic consequences.
“Our ability as a society to return to a higher level of functioning depends on having as many people protected as possible,” said Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch.
Respondents to the Kaiser Family Foundation survey, who said they were unlikely to receive the vaccine, said they were concerned about side effects; they do not trust the government to ensure that vaccines are safe; they have concerns about the role of policy in vaccine development; or they believe that the dangers of COVID-19 have been exaggerated.
In online forums, some health professionals across the country have expressed frustration at going first – a status that some associate with experimentation.
Nicholas Ruiz, an office assistant at Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, California, said health professionals struggle with the same doubts, fears and misinformation about the disease as the general public. Although he interacts with nurses who treat patients with COVID-19, he does not take it and knows many others who do not.
“I feel that the public’s perception of health professionals is incorrect. They may think that we are all informed about all of this. They can think that because we work in this environment ”, said Ruiz. “But I know that there are a lot of people who have the same mindset as the public and are still afraid to achieve that.”
In Fresno County, interim public health officer, Dr. Rais Vohra, said on Tuesday that some “people qualified to receive the vaccine are not ready to receive it”. These health professionals, including those who are pregnant or wish to become pregnant, hesitate when questions arise about the long-term effects.
To persuade reluctant workers, many hospitals are using instructional videos and interactive webinars that show employees being vaccinated. At an Orange County hospital, Anthony Wilkinson, an intensive care nurse who cares for patients with coronavirus, said he has coworkers who “have lost faith in the big pharmaceutical companies and even the CDC.”
Wilkinson made a video on Facebook about the science behind the vaccine and has informed friends and family about his progress after receiving it. “People are scared for me. I can understand why. It is new and nobody wants to be the first, ”he said.
The first distributions of the vaccine made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech arrived last week in Tehama County, where 65,000 people live.
Dr. Richard Wickenheiser, Tehama County health officer, said 495 doses were made available for the first time to health professionals at St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Red Bluff, but the hospital “basically returned 200 to us.”
“They gave us these vaccines back and we quickly started taking them out and using them,” said Wickenheiser. “I don’t want to be accused of having it in the freezer while we wait for people to make up their minds.”
At Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, about 10% of the nursing staff chose not to receive the vaccine, said spokeswoman Zoe Harris.
As of Tuesday, UCLA Health had vaccinated 7,300 employees from more than 37,000, although it is unclear how many people received the vaccine because the hospital did not release this information. The authorities acknowledged that “there may be hesitation regarding the vaccine in our workforce”.
“We are not asking staff to decide immediately whether to receive the vaccine. We want to give the vaccines offered adequate time to make a decision and 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 the team within nursing homes, which account for about 35% of the more than 25,000 deaths from COVID-19 in California.
But about a quarter of employees expressed reluctance to get the vaccine, said senior home managers and employees interviewed by The Times.
“They are afraid of side effects, they don’t know what will happen or if it will really protect them,” said a licensed professional nurse in a Los Angeles nursing home who asked that her name not be released because she is not allowed to speak. with the media. “It has become so political.”
She was reluctant to take the vaccine alone until the 95-bed facility where she works, which had been free of the virus for months, was hit by rapid spread in the community. “We have 16 new cases in just three days,” she said. “It’s so fast that we don’t even know how it happens.”
“Reluctance? There is definitely a lot of reluctance,” said Dr. Michael Wasserman, medical director of Eisenberg Village nursing home in Reseda and former president of California Assn. At Long Term Care Medicine, which represents doctors, nurses and others who work in nursing homes.
“Since there was no transparency or clarity from the federal government with the implementation, states and counties often did not know what was going on until the last minute,” he said. “It makes the vaccine’s reluctance even worse.”
It is not clear what happens when a hospital ends up with extra doses. State guidance allows hospitals to offer the vaccine to low-priority people if frontline workers have already received the vaccine.
In Tehama County, doses not used in hospitals are being distributed to the next group of people who are eligible: employees and residents of healthcare facilities and specialized nursing.
Meanwhile, the county health department is receiving daily calls about access, said Wickenheiser, the Tehama County health officer, adding: “The public is asking daily, ‘When are we going to get it?'”
Times team writers Laura Newberry and Jaclyn Cosgrove and photojournalist Francine Orr contributed to this report.