Miami public hospital employees split on whether they want to receive COVID-19 vaccine
As a handful of Florida hospitals prepare to receive a COVID-19 vaccine by Pfizer nearing emergency federal approval, about half of the workforce at one of them — Miami-Dade County’s public hospital network — said they would be interested in receiving a shot in the next several weeks, according to a poll conducted by the health system last week.
Jackson Health System’s internal survey drew 5,906 respondents, about half of the organization’s employees. The question: “Would you receive the COVID-19 vaccine once available in the first round (potentially in mid-December 2020 or early 2021)?”
Just under half the respondents, or 49.4%, said they would be interested, while 35.7% said they are not interested in this round but would consider in the future. The rest, 14.9%, said they were not interested in a COVID-19 vaccine at all.
Dr. David Woolsey, who has worked in Jackson Memorial Hospital’s emergency department for 30 years, was an emphatic yes. The South Florida native is approaching 60 years old, and said his personal view from weighing the available data about the Pfizer vaccine is that the risk of side effects is minimal.
Despite having treated COVID patients since March, Woolsey said he has never had a documented infection, though he has been frequently tested at the hospital.
“The risk of me not taking it and getting COVID and dying from COVID, especially where I work, is not huge, but it’s measurable,” Woolsey said. “I think I’m way better off taking it than not taking it, but that’s just me.”
The lukewarm response to vaccine among other employees has implications for how widely the doses could be distributed in the first phase, where two local hospitals — Jackson and Memorial Health System in Broward County — are set to receive tens of thousands of doses as soon as Friday but more likely at a yet to be determined date next week.
Once those hospital systems distribute the vaccine among their own employees, they would then help healthcare workers from other hospitals get inoculated, though the logistics of how that would happen are still unclear.
Caution shouldn’t be criticized
Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that Jackson Health was doing exactly the right thing to address vaccine hesitancy by polling its workforce and hearing their concerns.
She added that the 35% of respondents who said they might be interested in being vaccinated at a later date shouldn’t necessarily be discounted as people who are unlikely to take the vaccine.
“That’s a reasonable position to take in that these are new vaccines and new technologies,” Schoch-Spana said.
Though safety and efficacy data have been overwhelmingly positive, especially for the Pfizer vaccine heading to Jackson, Schoch-Spana said the vaccine hasn’t yet been given to enough people — millions as opposed to tens of thousands — to fully understand the more rare side effects, so some degree of hesitancy is to be expected.
It’s unclear whether hospitals will share the date of vaccine arrival once they find out, with one official at Jackson citing potential security concerns. Jared Moskowitz, the director of the state agency coordinating vaccine distribution, said last week that officials would know more about shipments when the vaccine receives emergency federal approval.
As of Wednesday afternoon, that had yet to come, though Pfizer’s vaccine had already been approved in the United Kingdom and in Canada.
While about half of Jackson’s workforce completed the survey, any eligible Jackson employee who would like to receive the vaccine will be able to do so in this first phase, said Jennifer Piedra, senior director of communication and outreach at Jackson.
“We have been assured that we will receive ample supply of vaccines for all of our interested healthcare workers,” she said.
Prepping for the first phase of inoculations
Last week, Venessa Goodnow, said the intention of the survey was to gauge employee interest, as the hospital system prepares to inoculate its workers and help coordinate the vaccination of other healthcare workers in the area.
Goodnow said at the time that the public hospital system’s mission to serve Miami-Dade was likely to resonate with some Jackson employees considering the vaccine, but she added that it was a “very personal decision.”
“That message [about Jackson’s mission] is out there, and then at the same time, people are going to make their own decision,” Goodnow said.
Schoch-Spana, the Johns Hopkins researcher, said that while you might expect healthcare workers to be more open to vaccination than the general public because they work in the health sector, that’s not always been the case.
She raised the example of a smallpox vaccination campaign in 2003, which she said did not have a high level of uptake in healthcare workers for many reasons, but one was that they didn’t understand the purpose of the vaccination campaign and they didn’t feel adequately consulted.
As for her own research, Schoch-Spana said that the public’s willingness to take an early-stage COVID-19 vaccine waned from May to September but has been ticking up since then.
“So that half [at Jackson] are saying yes is an excellent thing, and that 35% are saying maybe later is still positive,” she said.
Woolsey, the Jackson emergency department doctor, said he was paying particularly close attention to what Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s foremost infectious disease expert, had to say about the new vaccines, and listening to it.
“You’ve got to trust somebody at some point,” Woolsey said.
This story was originally published December 10, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
