Some health workers refuse to take the COVID-19 vaccine

They are frontline workers with priority access to the COVID-19 vaccine, but they refuse to take it.

At St. Elizabeth’s Community Hospital in Tehama County, less than half of the 700 hospital staff eligible for the vaccine were ready to get the vaccine when it was first offered. At Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, one in five nurses and primary care physicians have refused the vaccine. According to county public health officials, about 20 to 40 percent of frontline workers in LA County who were offered the vaccine did the same.

So many frontline workers in Riverside County refused the vaccine – around 50% – that hospital and state officials met to work out how best to distribute unused doses, the director said. Kim Saruwatari Public Health.

Vaccine doubts swirling among healthcare workers across the country come as a surprise to researchers, who speculated that hospital staff would be among those most in tune with the scientific data supporting the vaccines. .

The scientific evidence is clear regarding the safety and effectiveness of vaccines after trials involving tens of thousands of participants, including the elderly and people with chronic diseases. Injections are recommended for everyone except those who have had a severe allergic reaction to any of the ingredients.

Yet skepticism remains.

April Lu, a 31-year-old nurse at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center, said she refused to take the vaccine because she was not convinced it was safe for pregnant women. She is six months pregnant.

Clinical trials have not yet been conducted on pregnant women who take the vaccine, but experts believe the vaccine is unlikely to pose a specific risk, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The agency says pregnant women can choose to be vaccinated.

“I choose the risk – the risk of having COVID, or the unknown risk of the vaccine. I think I choose the risk of COVID. I can control that and prevent it a bit by wearing masks, but not 100%, ”Lu said.

Some of her colleagues have also refused to take the vaccine because they have gone for months without contracting the virus and believe they have a good chance of surviving, she said. “I feel like people are thinking, ‘I can still do this until this ends without getting the vaccine,’ she said.

The extent to which healthcare workers are refusing the vaccine is unclear, but reports of lower than expected participation rates are emerging across the country, which worries epidemiologists who believe the implications for public health could be disastrous.

A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29% of healthcare workers were “reluctant to immunize,” a figure slightly higher than the percentage of the general population, 27%.

“Even the name, Operation Warp Speed, is causing some concern in people about the rush to get it through,” said Dr. Medell Briggs-Malonson, an emergency physician at UCLA Health who received the vaccine. Yet she urged her colleagues to do the same.

“It is certainly disappointing,” said Sal Rosselli, president of the National Union of Health Workers. “But that’s not shocking, given what the federal administration has been doing over the past 10 months. … Trust the science. It’s about science, reality, and what’s right. “

The consequences are potentially dire: if too few people are vaccinated, the pandemic will drag on indefinitely, leading to future outbreaks, undue strain on the health care system, and continued economic fallout.

“Our ability as a society to return to a higher level of functioning depends on protecting as many people as possible,” said Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch.

Respondents to the Kaiser Family Foundation survey who said they likely would not receive the vaccine said they were concerned about side effects; they lack confidence in the government to make sure vaccines are safe; they worry about the role of politics in vaccine development; or they believe the dangers of COVID-19 have been exaggerated.

In online forums, some healthcare workers across the country expressed frustration at starting – a status some associated with experimentation.

Nicholas Ruiz, an office assistant at Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, Calif., Said healthcare workers grapple with the same doubts, fears and misinformation about the disease as the public. Although he interacts with nurses who treat patients with COVID-19, he does not take it and knows many others who are not.

“I have the impression that the public perception of healthcare workers is incorrect. They might think we are all aware of all of this. They might think so because we are working in this environment, ”Ruiz said. “But I know there are a lot of people who have the same mindset as the audience where they’re still scared to get it.

In Fresno County, Dr Rais Vohra, acting public health official, said on Tuesday that “some people who are qualified to receive the vaccine are not ready to get it.” These health workers, including those who are pregnant or planning to become pregnant, have been reluctant to question the long-term effects.

To persuade reluctant workers, many hospitals are using instructional videos and interactive webinars showing staff getting vaccinated. At an Orange County hospital, Anthony Wilkinson, an intensive care nurse who cares for coronavirus patients, said he had colleagues who had “lost faith in the big pharmaceutical companies and even the CDCs “.

Wilkinson made a video on Facebook about the science behind the vaccine and told friends and family about its progress after receiving it. “People are afraid for me. I can understand why. It’s new and nobody wants to be the first, ”he said.

The first vaccine allocations made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech arrived last week in Tehama County, home to 65,000 people.

Dr Richard Wickenheiser, the Tehama County health official, said 495 doses were first made available to health workers at St. Elizabeth’s Community Hospital in Red Bluff, but the hospital “basically gave us 200”.

“They returned these vaccines to us, and we quickly started to bring them out and use them,” Wickenheiser said. “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 nurses have chosen not to receive the vaccine, spokeswoman Zoe Harris said.

As of Tuesday, UCLA Health had vaccinated 7,300 of more than 37,000 staff members, although it is not known how many people received the vaccine because the hospital had not disclosed this information. Officials acknowledged that “there may be a reluctance to immunize among our staff.”

“We are not asking staff to immediately decide whether to receive the vaccine. We want to give the proposed vaccines enough time to make a decision, and we hope staff will continue to understand that the benefits of vaccination clearly outweigh the risks, ”the hospital said in a statement.

The uncertainty is shared by staff at nursing homes, which account for about 35% of the more than 25,000 deaths from COVID-19 in California.

But about a quarter of staff have expressed reluctance to take the vaccine, nursing home administrators and employees interviewed by The Times said.

“They’re afraid of the side effects, they don’t know what’s going to happen or if it’s really going to protect them,” said a professional nurse at a Los Angeles nursing home who asked that her name not be used because that she is not allowed to speak to the media. “It has become so political.”

She was reluctant to take the vaccine herself until the 95-bed facility she works in, which had been virus-free for months, was hit by the rapid spread of the community. “We have 16 new cases in just three days,” she says. “It’s so fast, we don’t even know how it’s going.”

“Reluctance? No doubt, there is a lot of reluctance,” said Dr. Michael Wasserman, medical director of the Eisenberg Village retirement home in Reseda and former president of the California Assn. Of Long Term Care Medicine, which represents the doctors, nurses and others working in nursing homes.

“Because there was no transparency or clarity on the part of the federal government with the deployment, states and counties often did not know what was going on until the last minute,” he said. he declares. “This further compounds the reluctance to take the vaccine.”

It is not known what happens when a hospital ends up with extra doses. State guidelines allow hospitals to offer the vaccine to lower priority people if frontline workers have already been offered the vaccine.

In Tehama County, unused doses in hospitals are distributed to the next group of eligible people: staff and residents of assisted living facilities and skilled nursing facilities.

Meanwhile, the county health department is answering daily phone calls over access, said Wickenheiser, the Tehama County health official, adding: “The public is asking daily, ‘When are we going ‘get?’ ‘

Times editors Laura Newberry and Jaclyn Cosgrove and photojournalist Francine Orr contributed to this report.