DOTHAN, Ala. – Greg Wood, 51, is uncertain about getting a COVID-19 vaccine. Like many people who share his reluctance about the shot, Wood is nervous about the unknowns.
“I’m not always skeptical, but most things take time to work through the system. This was done real fast and that does tend to make me worry about it.”
In Alabama, vaccine hesitancy is driven by many factors, and the wider reluctance is complicating the effort to combat the virus. Vaccination rates have slowed in the last few weeks in Alabama, as throughout the country, raising questions about whether it will be possible to end the pandemic.
Wood, who lives in West Blocton and works for Amazon, also fears he’ll have side effects and will need to call in sick. That’s something he can’t afford right now.
“Amazon, they’ll give you the vaccine there, and they’ll give you time off, but it’s not paid time off.”
Still, he’s leaning toward getting the shot. At some point.
Slowest in the nation
President Biden announced Tuesday he is pushing for 70 percent vaccination nationally by the 4th of July. But slowing vaccine uptake in states like Alabama may make that difficult to achieve. In Alabama, according to the CDC, just 24 percent of adults are fully vaccinated.
The state is still ranked last nationwide for the percentage of residents with both shots.
The Biden administration this week also said vaccines could be taken from states that can’t give them out fast enough. Gov. Kay Ivey urged Alabamians to talk to their doctors and to get the shot.
“If we don’t use it, we could lose it,” Ivey said in a statement on Tuesday.
On Wednesday morning, Alabama State Health Officer Scott Harris told the Legislature that there have only been 400 breakthrough cases in Alabama, where vaccinated people have gotten COVID-19, and none have been severe.
“This is our ticket back to normal,” said Ivey this week. “The vaccine is free and could possibly save your life.”
Bibb County Doctor John Waits, CEO at Cahaba Medical Care, has conversations about the vaccine with patients in his predominantly white and rural region of Alabama. In a state already trailing the nation, Bibb County has some of the lowest vaccination rates in Alabama.
“We’ve vaccinated the desperate, we’ve vaccinated the willing,” he said, “and now here we are.”
Just 20 percent of the eligible population, meaning 16 and older, has had two shots in Bibb County, compared to about 29 percent of people 16 and over across Alabama.
Many of Dr. Waits’s patients say they will be fine without a vaccine. Some have religious or other objections to getting the shot.
“I’ve had some private questions from people, the most stark was this one, ‘My pastor says that the vaccine is the mark of the beast in Revelation,” he said.
But mostly his patients want to put off the shot for another day, or even wait a few years, until more is known about vaccines.
“This morning, I had a patient that just, you know, ‘I don’t think I need it.’ (He’s) 70 years old. ‘I never get my flu shot, I don’t think I need this, I’ll be okay.’”
Hesitancy is multifaceted
Alabama State Health Officer Dr. Scott Harris said a return to a semblance of normalcy depends on vaccination rates.
“That’s how the economy recovers, that’s how people’s jobs are more secure, that’s how hospitals are protected, that’s how our family members live in nursing homes are protected,” he told AL.com on Friday.
Nationally, public health experts are now questioning whether it will ever be possible to achieve herd immunity, a point at which enough people in the population are protected and unable to spread the disease.
Dr. Harris said regardless, the state’s health department is exclusively focused on the day-to-day goal of increasing vaccinations.
While some states, like West Virginia, have started to offer financial incentives for people to get vaccinated, Dr. Harris said Alabama has no plans to pay people to persuade them to get a shot.
Instead, the department is partnering with a group going door to door to speak with about 20,000 Alabamians about the vaccine. The state is also asking doctors to call their patients about the shots.
Harris recognizes the reasons for vaccine hesitancy vary from group to group.
“There is this misconception that among the partisan, that the vaccine is more dangerous than the actual disease, which is completely false, but that’s still a narrative out there we have to combat,” said Harris.
Harris noted the historic distrust of medicine among some African Americans following the infamous syphilis study at Tuskegee.
“We are doing our best to try to think about how we communicate and how we educate and what kind of outreach would be helpful and what kind of trusted voices can be found in individual communities.”
Dr. Stephanie McClure, an anthropologist at the University of Alabama is leading a team gathering data on vaccine hesitancy among communities of color so they can tailor public outreach.
“(Hesitancy) can come out with everything from, ‘I think my body is strong enough to fight it off, to ‘I’ve had COVID, so my immune system is strong enough to fight off,’ to ‘I don’t trust the government or the pharmaceutical companies or foreign objects in my body’
Some people don’t like feeling they are being told what to do by someone outside of their community, she said. Others lack transportation or time off work to get a vaccine.
“It’s all of those (reasons). And it’s going to be a mixture, so the answer to hesitancy, like the answer to life, the universe and everything, it’s not one answer. It’s not 42.”
