Getting COVID vaccine is matter of life and death, Black doctors tell Wichitans
The COVID-19 vaccines are safe, and they are needed to save lives, four Black doctors told Wichita’s African American community on Monday.
“It’s safe. It’s been proven to be safe,” Dr. Regan DeHart of GraceMed Health Clinic said. “I would much rather have a sore arm for a day and a half than to be calling my personal doctor to say I cannot breathe. ... Take the vaccine so we can breathe.”
DeHart was one of four physicians in Monday’s virtual town hall meeting hosted by the Wichita African American Council of Elders and the Wichita Black Alliance as part of their #FactsNotFear campaign. The doctors addressed whether African Americans should get the COVID-19 vaccine.
“You have to weigh the risk against the benefit,” DeHart said. “Our risk is becoming very ill or even dying, versus the benefit of living. We are at that point where we are getting close to it’s life or it’s death.”
The coronavirus disease has killed 2,548 Kansans so far, including 351 people from Sedgwick County, according to Kansas Department of Health and Environment data.
The United States has had more than 335,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19. The country is currently averaging more than 2,200 new deaths every day, according to The New York Times.
The new Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are expected to help, but not in time to slow the winter surge.
Building community trust
“We understand why there’s so much distrust, in our community especially based on some history,” said Dr. Rita Stanley, a Kansas City-based specialist in alternative and holistic services.
Additionally, marginalized populations, including racial minorities, are often on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, DeHart said. “And the definition of front lines is evolving. At first we thought police officers and firemen. We forgot about the people who clean in the hospital. We forget about people who clean up in the stores that we frequent. These are our people who have lots of chronic health problems, people who already have lower socioeconomic status. They can’t take off work, they don’t have COVID pay, they have to support their families, so they go to work ... these are the populations that are at greatest risk right now.”
Stanley referenced the African cultural holiday of Kwanzaa, which is ongoing this week. The holiday has seven principles, including unity and responsibility, that Stanley said “speak to this pandemic.”
“When I say I want to live, I’m really saying I want to live for me and the people around me,” she said. “I want to live for the children and the older people. I want to do what is right for me by getting the vaccine, but I also want to help people as much as I can to really understand the facts around these vaccines so we can put to rest some of these fears.”
Black doctors hope the community will trust them when they say the vaccine is safe.
“It’s not just for me, but to protect the people around me, my family and my community,” Dr. Maurice Duggins, a family physician with Ascension Via Christi, said of getting his first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. “The community itself needs to have an example that it’s a safe vaccine to be taken, and if I’m going to put myself out there to take it, hopefully they’ll recognize that if I think it’s safe, then hopefully they’ll also think it’s safe.
“It’s been tested with thousands of people and it has demonstrated good efficacy, so we just need to get enough people comfortable with the idea of being vaccinated instead of dying from COVID, like so many have already. We unfortunately have too many African Americans dying, disproportionately, from COVID.”
Duggins said his only side effect from the vaccine was some soreness in the area where the shot was administered. DeHart, who got the Moderna vaccine, said she had some pain in her arm the day after getting vaccinated, but the shot also made her excited and gave her “a pep in my step.”
“I felt a pep, and I know that was mostly physiological, but we’re a part of history and that’s exciting,” she said.
New mRNA vaccines
DeHart said the mRNA technique used by researchers to develop the COVID-19 vaccine has excited scientists about future uses for the technology.
The COVID-19 vaccines using mRNA are different from other types of vaccines. They do not contain a live virus, so you cannot get infected with COVID-19 or spread it to other people by getting vaccinated.
The vaccines trigger the patient’s cells to make a harmless spike protein and train the immune system to develop antibodies to neutralize the spike protein, Stanley said. The body will then know how to fight the coronavirus if it is infected in the future.
Both vaccines need a second dose. The first injection activates the immune system, which starts building up antibodies, Duggins said. The second shot “is like a booster to get it over the top” and increase protection.
The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are 94-95% effective after two doses. After one dose, they are approximately 50% effective.
“Both of them have gone through rigorous safety assessment and received their emergency use authorization and are being used,” Stanley said. “A lot of people say, ‘Oh, it was so fast, I don’t trust it.’ You have to know ... there was science brought on behind the scenes way before this pandemic that made use of mRNA seemingly happen fast, but you have virologist that have been working on mRNA for years. It’s their life’s work.”
“It did happen fast, but not without the safety guidelines that every vaccine has to go through.”
Side effects and unknowns
Patients may experience side effects after getting vaccinated. Common ones include pain around the injection site, fatigue, and headaches. There are some rare but serious complications, such as severe allergic reactions.
People who have previously had allergic reactions to shots should let their medical provider know before getting the shot. Neither vaccine has been tested on pregnant women or children younger than 16.
It is unknown how long the vaccine protection lasts and whether annual shots will be necessarily, like with flu vaccines.
“What we don’t quite know is do people still get infected after the vaccine,” Stanley said. “What we do know is people don’t get the severe infection, which is killing Black people and people of color.”
That unknown means immunized patients should still follow health guidelines, including wearing a face mask and social distancing, to protect themselves and others.
“Just because we have the vaccine doesn’t mean that we are 100% safe,” DeHart said. “... We could still possibly catch COVID, though it is more likely that it would be a mild case.”
Duggins said people who have previously been infected with the coronavirus should still get vaccinated because it is unknown how long the immunity lasts.
The doctor who had COVID
Dr. Dennis Onentia Oyieng’o, a pulmonary and critical care specialist with Ascension Via Christi, previously contracted and recovered from COVID-19.
“It was scary,” Oyieng’o said. “The biggest thing was not knowing what to expect. I had seen a lot of patients suffer.”
Oyieng’o said COVID-19 is especially taxing on a patient’s lungs, making it more difficult to breathe. Some patients spend as much as two months in the hospital, losing livelihoods and loved ones.
“Today I was just seeing a patient, and he was telling me: ‘I’m tired, I’m tired of breathing. I can’t do this anymore because I can’t get in a comfortable position,’ where he can feel comfortable in his breathing,” Oyieng’o said.
“When you look in his face, you can see a lot of despair. Initially when he came in, he was very optimistic. But right now as the disease is catching up with him and he’s getting weaker and more short of breath, you can sense in him that he’s sensing that maybe death is imminent. You can look in his eyes and see his fear, that he’s afraid of what’s coming.
“Unfortunately, when you try to reassure him — you’ve seen a lot of the same cases before, you’ve seen what’s happened to them — you can try to give him some hope, but the hope is not there. We know it’s likely, more than not, that he’s going to end up on a breathing machine and eventually possibly die.”
Oyieng’o said 70-80% of people need to get vaccinated to stop the pandemic, and people have a personal responsibility as well as a responsibility to their family and community to get the vaccine.
While health care workers are being prioritized for immunizations, vaccines likely will not be available in mass quantities to the general public until late spring or early summer.
“We are in a tailspin,” Stanley said. “It is dire right now. The only way that we are going to get on the other side of this without hundreds of thousands of more people dying, particularly people of color, is if we get this vaccine.”
This story was originally published December 29, 2020 at 12:04 PM.