So the lessons learned for me from being out there for the last 18 months is, number one, knowing your community, involving people who the community knows and trusts
and walked over, and I asked Security, who are these people? Most of these people were young Asians, young Caucasian folks, a few African Americans and a few Latinx. That line went down the block.
Luckily, because I was a CDU employee and I had on my CDU lab jacket with my logo. When I went up to say, I’ m here to be vaccinated, I got in right away. I filled out the paperwork, got my vaccine, waited 15 minutes for observation and I left. Kedren tailored their program to meet the needs of the community, with a late evening vaccine site where you could go at 10 or 11 o’ clock at night.
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So the lessons learned for me from being out there for the last 18 months is, number one, knowing your community, involving people who the community knows and trusts
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I noticed the staff that they had available were for multilingual, multicultural clients, and they were very friendly. There were no major hassles. They made it very, very easy for people to get access to the vaccine. Their model has been very, very effective in reaching all populations in LA County, not just the medically underserved and at-risk ethnic minorities. They’ ve been effective in providing service to all populations.
But racial ethnic minorities are still being disproportionately impacted when you look at morbidity and mortality. I think African Americans right now still have higher mortality rates any one any other ethnic group within the county. There’ s still a need for extensive community mobilization, education and outreach.
I’ m going to give you an example. Several months ago, the county came to us and said, the lowest vaccination rates right now under 30 % are out in the Lancaster-Palmdale area. And we want to know can Drew and Kedren help us reach the African American community out there. We were able to facilitate a vaccine event at a major African American church, That is an area that we plan to target on a regular basis.
It’ s been reported through the health department that younger African Americans and Latinx populations are still not vaccinated at high rates: less than 50 % for young people between the ages of 16 and maybe 30. And now that the vaccine has been approved, at least Pfizer has been approved for children 12 and up, there’ s still a lot of hesitation by some parents to get their kids vaccinated.
So the lessons learned for me from being out there for the last 18 months is, number one, knowing your community, involving people who the community knows and trusts, engaging popular opinion leaders to get involved, educate the community to dispel a lot of misinformation circulating through social media; having very effective and culturally appropriate marketing campaigns,
One of our program coordinators for vaccine and the CDU vaccine initiative has a history of working with some local well known rap artists. We plan to try to bring them on board to see if they can help us promote greater vaccine uptake among the younger generation, even though the rapper that she has worked with has said he’ s not vaccinated.
We’ re saying well, even though you don’ t want to get vaccinated at this point, there’ s still other options that people have, educating the community and getting screened on a regular basis. At least they can be promoting a vaccine screening if they don’ t want to promote being vaccinated. That’ s something that we’ re going to be looking into really, really soon. We’ ve got to come up with as many options and alternatives to get people to begin to personalize this. And to not be guided by fear and stigma and misinformation so that they can protect themselves. The outcome is to move the needle so that with choices, people aren’ t feeling like they’ re being bludgeoned over the head. This is a disease that’ s 100 % preventable.
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 22