PD Editorial: Conversations are winning over the vaccine-hesitant

Thankfully, not all COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is political. With the right approach, it is far easier to ease genuine concerns about safety and efficiency than it is to change a locked-in partisan point of view.

That a substantial portion of eligible Americans who have so far declined to get vaccinated are amenable to reason and persuasion has become clear as vaccination rates have risen in response to the delta surge.

One of the biggest success stories in Sonoma County has been among Latinos, who have seen vaccination rates increase drastically since February. Latinos have gone from accounting for 11% of residents who have received at least one vaccine dose to 24%, Staff Writer Martin Espinoza reported. That’s much more representative. Latinos comprise 27% of the county population.

That success is the result of a concerted campaign that proves a point we made in an Aug. 18 editorial (“Don’t belittle the unvaccinated; reason with them”): It may be more effective to approach the vaccine hesitant with reason, accurate information and empathy than with anger, shaming and disdain.

Sonoma County’s successful campaign was multifaceted, reducing disparities in access to vaccines with pop-up clinics, lowering cultural barriers by ensuring bilingual staffing at the clinics and diminishing vaccine hesitancy by sending outreach teams into the community.

Yecenia Gonzalez, a community health worker who is part of the outreach team, said she saw the need for better education while working as a contact tracer and case investigator during the winter surge.

“We kind of just saw the need to reach out to people with education before they became a positive COVID case,” she said. “A lot of the reasons people were getting COVID was because they didn’t know how to prevent it.”

Calmly and authoritatively responding to concerns and misinformation can help overcome hesitation in Gonzalez’s experience. She’s talked with people concerned that the vaccines’ development and approval were rushed who were reassured when she explained that the method used for the vaccines had been under study for years and that no steps were skipped during the trial studies and approval process.

Money from Kaiser Permanente, the county’s largest health care provider, helped fund the campaign. Kaiser gave out $5 million in Northern California to promote vaccine education, staffing and translation at pop-up clinics and outreach efforts in remote areas. Kaiser’s efforts also included funding for a countywide campaign to boost vaccine confidence in the African American community.

Recent nationwide surveys have found that vaccination rates among Black Americans have steadily increased after considerable initial hesitancy, largely because of numerous outreach and educational efforts similar to those that have been so successful in Sonoma County.

While there were stark racial disparities early in the vaccine ramp-up, vaccine rates among the races have evened out. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey found 70% of Black adults, 71% of white adults and 73% of Hispanic adults have received at least one dose.

Vaccines soon will be authorized for children between 5 and 11 years old. Getting doses to them will require buy in from parents, and that means the persuasion must continue in order to save more lives. Respectful, compassionate, honest education efforts are working.

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