Public health officials in National Capitol region struggle to persuade the hesitant to be vaccinated

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Wed, 2021-06-30 17:40 — mike kraft

Public health officials struggle to persuade the hesitant to be vaccinated Low case rates make it more difficult to convey that the coronavirus threat is real. Jenna Portnoy Washington Post

Public health officials were already struggling with how to persuade coronavirus vaccination holdouts to get the shot. But declining case rates and a highly contagious variant have made their work at once more difficult — and more urgent.

In month 16 of the pandemic, local governments have closed most large-scale clinics and are homing in on the hardest-to-reach individuals, with modest goals of vaccinating a handful of people at a time.

The increasing prevalence of the delta variant, first discovered in India, underscores the importance of getting vaccinated, experts say, because the highly contagious strain could trigger outbreaks in still-vulnerable communities where vaccination rates are low.

Virginia, where as few as 30 percent of residents in some southwest counties are vaccinated, had reported at least 48 cases of the variant through Friday. Maryland had seen 48 cases of the same variant as of June 22, officials said.

Officials are turning to behavioral health scientists to figure out the best way to persuade the hesitant, using cellphone data to identify places to send mobile vaccination units and relying on the tried and true: one-on-one conversations with trusted community leaders.

“We have done such a good job of getting to the masses. We should just accept that the next few months of work will be slower and harder,” said Danny Avula, Virginia’s vaccine coordinator. “That’s how we chip away at the remaining portion of our population who are unvaccinated.”

The low infection rate — cases and deaths have dropped precipitously in Virginia, Maryland and the District as statewide vaccination rates approached 70 percent of all adults — could undermine the effort to vaccinate others.

“There’s no doubt that it is extremely difficult to motivate the remaining part of the population that has not been vaccinated to get vaccinated when infection rates are low,” Avula said. “We don’t want fear to be the motivation for health behaviors but want people to know we are not out of the woods.” ...

The top reason for hesitancy is concern over side effects, according to analysis of Facebook survey data performed weekly by a team of researchers at the University of Virginia Biocomplexity Institute.

But respondents are increasingly citing distrust of the government or vaccine science, and the feeling that the vaccine is unnecessary, as reasons to take a pass for now, said Bryan Lewis, a computational epidemiologist at the institute. ...

Jeff Feit, the community and population health manager at Valley Health, a health-care system based in Winchester, VA, said conservative rural residents who decided to get vaccinated tend to be the best messengers for their community. ...

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