These Pierce County folks tamed their vaccine doubts, fears. UW Tacoma students helped
Nobody wants to be forced to take a COVID-19 vaccine. Nobody wants to be browbeaten, badgered or dragged kicking and screaming to a vaccination clinic, feeling unready to make an informed decision but begrudgingly taking a jab in the arm just to get people off their back.
Nobody in the public health field should want to employ such tactics, either. There are many good persuasion tools available to reverse Pierce County’s lagging inoculation rate (38 percent of residents age 16+ fully vaccinated vs. 48 percent statewide). Coercion isn’t one of them.
Allowing space for holdouts to come around on their own ought to be the preferred way to go about this extraordinary task.
That’s why I was impressed during my visit this week to a community vaccination clinic at the University of Washington Tacoma, the second of two held at the downtown campus in May.
The event was coordinated by UWT students, the environment low-key, the mood as chill as a dormitory lounge during finals week. Those getting shots had access to encouraging, knowledgeable people, many who speak a language other than English and can relate to the young adult experience.
Some seats were filled by folks who told me their personal stories of vaccine hesitancy and how they ultimately overcame it.
Chris Bussom of Graham was there with her daughter Nikole, a UWT student who’s already vaccinated. “I work at a grocery store and very much didn’t want to get it done,” Bussom told me after receiving her one-dose Johnson & Johnson shot Wednesday.
Neither she nor her co-workers became ill this past year, she said, despite their front-line COVID exposure. That, combined with pervasive anti-masking, anti-vaccine sentiments in her rural community, kept her firmly on the fence.
Until one of her regular customers came by the store. He’d dropped a lot of weight. He told her he’d been terribly sick with the virus, couchbound for two weeks, his wife checking regularly to make sure he was breathing.
“He kind of put a bug in my ear to go get the COVID shot,” Bussom said.
In a nearby row of seats, Olivia and Hailey Trepanier of Port Orchard also dutifully waited out the 15-minute observation period after their shots. Olivia is pursuing a degree in arts, media and culture at UWT, and she brought her high-school age daughter for a campus tour.
So why not take care of their COVID protection at the same time? Hailey pushed through her strong aversion to needles and got ‘er done.
“It’s not every day mother and daughter get vaccinated together,” Olivia said, adding hopefully: “It’s not every day they go to college together.”
On this morning inside Philip Hall, I didn’t run into anyone representing the main target of the student-led initiative — Latinos who don’t speak English as their first language.
Making inroads with this population is clearly a tall order. Latinos comprise Pierce County’s least-vaccinated racial-ethnic demographic, at just 21.6 percent, according to the latest Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department figures.
A look at age data, meanwhile, reveals that those age 18-29 are Pierce County’s least-vaccinated adults by far.
A college-based program is tailor-made to reach both of these elusive groups: Latinos and young adults.
Juana Gallegos of University Place is a leader of the Husky Task Force, which has enlisted 63 volunteers and is seeking more. Count her among the 12 nurses in the group; the former Air Force service member is a pediatric nurse and a graduate student doing field work in the UWT School of Nursing and Healthcare Leadership.
Gallegos is sensitive to pressure campaigns. She’s also cognizant of deep-seated fears and misconceptions in underreached communities.
“I don’t like to feel forced,” she told me. “I don’t like being told what to do,” whether wearing a mask or receiving an inoculation. “The reason I want to do it is to protect people around me, like my elderly grandmother visiting from Mexico.”
And her two-month old son, Benjamin, whom she pushed in a stroller while making the rounds at Wednesday’s clinic.
The Husky Task Force has zeroed in on Latino people by making phone calls, posting fliers in targeted neighborhoods and respectfully dispelling the most common fallacies. Some questions frequently asked: Will the vaccine make me so sick I have to miss extended work time? Will I have to share information that may result in deportation?
Gallegos said volunteers have received training and contacts from the nonprofit group LUSS (Latinx Unidos of the South Sound). A crew of Spanish-speaking volunteers has the best chance of putting hesitant people at ease by communicating in their first language.
Other volunteers and interns have dispersed to local vaccination sites beyond UWT, helping with everything from scheduling to traffic control.
Now the school year is wrapping up and graduation is around the corner for many in the Husky Task Force. They hope next year’s class will pick up the torch.
Regardless, students will have a powerful incentive to get poked in the arm as classes resume in person. The whole UW system is requiring students (but strangely not yet faculty and staff) to be vaccinated by fall quarter, with limited exemptions.
The way Gallegos sees it, there are important lessons to preserve for the next public health emergency. First: New infectious diseases must be taken seriously from the get go — starting at the top, in the White House. Second: Spreading the word about the very real dangers of being infected can’t be a monolithic, monolingual undertaking.
With COVID, she said, “People didn’t get those messages in their language early enough.”
We should be glad the next generation of healthcare leaders holds these truths to be self-evident. Because nobody wants to be forced to do something they don’t fully grasp, and that nobody tried hard enough to make graspable.
Reach opinion editor Matt Misterek at matt.misterek@thenewstribune.com
This story was originally published May 22, 2021 at 6:00 AM.