For the last month, Dr. John Waits and his staff have asked the parents of any kid who walks into the clinic the same question: will the child have the COVID-19 vaccine?
“Instantly you see the body language and you get a sense of where we’re going,” says Waits, a family medicine physician and CEO of Cahaba Medical Care in Alabama. The conversations don’t usually end in a “heck no,” he says, but they don’t often end in an immediate vaccination, either. Across Cahaba’s network of 17 health clinics and several visits to local schools, Waits and his team have vaccinated about 150 children since Nov. 2, the day the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended the COVID-19 vaccine for kids ages 5 to 11.
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“One of the challenges of the pandemic that’s made it so hard for public health is that people just want to get back to their doctor and hear their doctor talk about it, and then kind of think about it,” Waits says. “That’s not the speed we need to continue to flatten the curve.”
Another challenge: Unless a patient actually receives the vaccine, Waits and his staff usually don’t get paid for the time spent counseling them about it. All that unpaid time makes for tough finances—especially for community health centers, like Cahaba, which often operate on thin margins and treat underserved populations, and which public health experts say are crucial to getting more Americans vaccinated.
Already the effort to vaccinate children has been an uphill battle. After an initial spike of interest in the first ten days that young children were eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine, progress has slowed significantly. More than a month later, just 1 in 5 children have gotten their first shot, and significant disparities have developed among states: some report that a quarter of kids are vaccinated; others are under 10%.
With Omicron taking off in the U.S. and cases surging amid holiday gatherings, President Joe Biden has been encouraging…
Source : time
