Close to Home: Vaccine efforts are letting kids down

I’m furious right now. Parents of kids under 5 years old have been patiently awaiting an opportunity to protect their kids from COVID-19 since vaccines were first offered to adults well over a year ago.

Trusted experts have repeated for months now that unvaccinated people are more at risk for severe complications from COVID and that it has taken a toll on their nervous systems. Their kids have been in day care and preschool throughout COVID exposures and closures, particularly during omicron, and I cried when I heard we can finally offer them both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

Twenty percent of parents were ready to sign their kids up on myturn.ca.gov to find the first available vaccination appointment, and one family in my practice did just that. Unfortunately, I didn’t have vaccines in my office yet, so they scheduled an appointment at a clinic at the Petaluma fairgrounds during the Sonoma-Marin Fair. I was grateful that they were resourceful enough to find another way to get vaccinated.

Unfortunately, they called my office the next day to tell me the health professional couldn’t administer the full vaccine dose despite multiple attempts. Moreover, they paid entry for the fair in order to get to their vaccine appointment. They wanted to know if a partial dose was reliable until the second Moderna dose was due in four weeks. My heart sank and I was furious.

When I think about how many times we’ve failed parents throughout this pandemic, despite our best intentions in public health, I hope from the bottom of my heart that we can learn from our mistakes and be better next time. It’s too simple to point fingers at the inexperienced health professional trying to vaccinate a fighting 3-year-old when there are so many systemic barriers that led to this error.

Why didn’t I have a COVID vaccine for her in my office when my staff are some of the most skilled Sonoma County professionals at administering vaccines to young children?

Why do we accept that our access to primary care and COVID vaccines depends on our employer-based health insurance?

Why can’t we figure out how to stop social media vaccine misinformation and disinformation and the stress is causes for so many parents that leaves us health professionals burned out and exhausted from pleading daily that COVID vaccines and routine immunizations are lifesaving?

Why can’t we figure out a way to bring together our local health professionals across institutions who are expert at vaccinating children to an outdoor location in central Sonoma County and offer the vaccine to anyone who wants it for as many days as it takes until every parent who wants their kid vaccinated can get it done?

Many hands make light work, as Russell Ponce, our Santa Rosa American Little League commissioner says, and I’m sure it wouldn’t take long if we all cared enough about the youngest kids in our community to work together to protect them.

In medicine we call this discussion M&M rounds, morbidity and mortality. We all need to hear about mistakes and troubleshoot how to be better.

There’s a lot of COVID out there right now and outpatient oral treatments like Paxlovid aren’t available for kids under 12 years old. COVID vaccines provide reliable durable immunity and are our best option to protect children as young as 6 months old.

I’m furious that we don’t care enough to urgently and collectively come up with a community solution to protect our children from COVID instead of continuing to independently address their public health needs in each of our broken individual health care silos.

Dr. Brian Prystowsky is a pediatrician with Sutter Medical Group of the Redwoods. He lives in Santa Rosa.

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