As vaccination rate lags, Sedgwick County hopes to convince skeptics to get a shot

As the supply of COVID-19 vaccines has increased, Sedgwick County officials are grappling with a problem they weren’t expecting this early in the year — more vaccine doses than people who want a shot.

“We’re trying to take away every barrier that we can think of regarding why someone would not get a vaccine,” Sedgwick County Manager Tom Stolz said Monday.

Those efforts include hiring interpreters and holding mobile vaccine clinics to target neighborhoods with low turnout to the vaccine clinic at the former Central Public Library in downtown Wichita.

Another major barrier, besides transportation, is people who have decided against getting a vaccine.

The county plans a marketing push to convince people the vaccines are safe and important to ending the pandemic. Sedgwick County has the lowest vaccination rate in the state, based on CDC data.

“We would hope that our Sedgwick County residents, a majority of our segment of county residents, would be vaccinated,” Stolz said. “I don’t know if we’re going to make that. I mean, you’ve heard the numbers.”

On Sunday, The Wichita Eagle cited CDC data that 9.3% of the Sedgwick County population was fully vaccinated, meaning they received a single dose of Johnson & Johnson or both doses of Moderna or Pfizer vaccines. That’s less than half the rate in Johnson County, the county with the largest population in Kansas.

Stolz said 12-15% of the adult population in Sedgwick County is fully vaccinated against the coronavirus and nearly a quarter of the population has received at least one dose.

“That’s a long way from where I think we want to be as a community if we’re really going to try to slow the spread and stop this virus from continuing to mutate and spread,” Stolz said.

To achieve herd immunity that would effectively kill the coronavirus, national health experts have estimated 70-85% of the population should be immune, either from vaccinations or from catching COVID-19.

All adults in Sedgwick County are now eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine. During the initial rollout of the vaccine, appointments for the following week would fill up in a matter of minutes or hours. Now, hundreds of appointments are open for this week, even same-day appointments.

Stolz said the county is planning to ramp up its marketing to make sure people know they can get the vaccine and that it’s safe.

“We had talked a lot about this back in January and February, and remembering back to that time period where it just seemed like we didn’t have enough vaccine to vaccinate as fast as we wanted to,” Stolz said. “We knew we’d come to a point — although I never thought it would be March, I thought it would be April or May — we knew we’d come to a point where we’d really begin to have to market the vaccines to the community at large.

“We have enough vaccine now,” Stolz said. “We have open appointments. We’re there, we need to market this.”

Stolz said the county is going to “put a real full-court press on communications” during the next two to four weeks.

Marketing has been a priority for the county since the start of the pandemic, allocating more than $306,000 in CARES Act funding to the Wichita Black Alliance for a marketing campaign to raise awareness and combat misinformation about COVID-19 in Wichita’s Black community.

This year, Sedgwick County Strategic Communications has spent $42,888 on advertising and marketing, county spokesperson Kate Flavin said Tuesday.

“Working with a media buyer we potentially may spend $125,000 on a vaccine campaign through television, radio, digital billboards, digital geo-fencing, and print publications,” Flavin said.

“There’s still people that don’t know if it’s safe, that have very basic, rudimentary questions about the vaccine itself,” Stolz said. “So I think as the public hears our messaging, a lot of them will roll their eyes and say, we know this, we’ve heard it, but we’re going to continue to repeat it because some folks still have questions.”

This story was originally published March 31, 2021 at 5:01 AM.