COVID-19 vaccines by demographics: 4 questions answered

KCRA 3 Investigates has been going over the latest coronavirus vaccine data released by the state of California. The most recent data provides details about who is getting the vaccine by race and ethnicity, age and gender.Dr. Bradley H. Pollock, associate dean and chair in public health Sciences, at UC Davis Health, spoke with KCRA 3 about the demographics data.Q: What are your overall thoughts on the data demographics dashboard?Pollock: One of the reasons to track race and ethnicity, as well as age, and, and sex, also, these are all really important factors is to make sure that we can identify any gaps there are in terms of the population that are getting vaccinated. That would be one reason. Second reason would be to be able to look at both vaccine efficacy, so, when people are vaccinated, you know, we know that the efficacy may be hopefully up to 95%, there’s still one in 20 people, then 5%, that would fail. And we don’t know yet whether there’s a particular higher rate or lower rate among certain ethnic-racial subgroups. So that would be important to know that. The same thing is true for any adverse events that occur, you know, any of the reactions that people have, that are serious. While there are data available from the clinical trials that were done to evaluate both of the vaccines, the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines, we still don’t have a really solid idea of whether there’s going to be differential adverse events in certain population subgroups. And so, having this information will be very helpful to be able to evaluate how the vaccines working, as well as to identify who to target for efforts if we’re seeing certain groups are not getting vaccine(s) equally. We want to be able to target those groups and increase our backs vaccination efforts.Q: Putting on your age, your race, ethnicity, where you live, all of that is not mandatory to receive the vaccine. We know that. But with that being said, do health care officials recommend or encourage people to do this, even though it’s not mandatory? Pollock: We really do prefer when people provide that information, of course. The information is kept confidentially, also. It’s not released for public at the level of individuals. So, having these demographic characteristics are really important, as I said, to be able to target certain groups if we’re not seeing enough vaccine uptake. That could be for lots of reasons, one of which would be just the availability of vaccination sites and doses of vaccine, and it could also be because of vaccine hesitancy. We do know that there are certain ethnic and racial subgroups where there have been more challenges in kind of overcoming this vaccine hesitancy so that would allow us to then calibrate our targeted efforts to try to overcome those disparities.Q: According to CDPH, only 10% of people who have received the vaccine so far have declined to provide this data. That means 90% have included demographics information. Is that promising?Pollock: Vey promising. Much better than what I heard a week ago, which was 60%. So, 90%% is much better. I hope that they get it up, that gets to be a higher rate than that because again, it helps us but 90% is very good.Q: Do the initial data reflect California’s population?Pollock: In relative to the first doses that came out, and remember that doses were shipped out two months ago. Now, they all went to large health care organizations. All of them. We, UC Davis Health, Kaiser, Sutter, Dignity, all of the big health providers. And the reason is that the very top tier people was to vaccinate the health care workers so that they wouldn’t be taken out of the workforce, if they get sick, they can take care. And remember, the hospitals were overwhelmed. So if you look at at the racial, ethnic composition of health care workers, it ranges quite a bit, but there certainly are going to be fewer people of color in nursing and medicine when it comes to the folks that we were. Actually, though, at UC Davis Health, we included all of our employees that were that worked at the Medical Center, including folks that that are not in the same professions — we have people that did a lot of the janitorial and foodservice. And there, what we did see, at least initially was a more hesitancy. There were fewer folks in some of those job categories that really agreed to get the vaccine. And so we’ve tried really hard to educate folks and then to make that available, and they still can get vaccinated. So we’ve actually been picking up some of that slack. But overall, I think that the fact that the first doses went to health care workers, the workforce, really doesn’t typify what the population looks like here. And as you said, we’re still a little bit early on, and now we’re seeing vaccines getting rolled out to the general population, only really in the last month. And in fact, there’s been issues of vaccine availability, as well as logistics. So I think those are kind of getting ramped up right now. And hopefully, in short time, we’ll actually be vaccinating in a very good, equitable way across the state. Again, with this material in mind, that there are people that are more vulnerable. In fact, if you look at the mortality from COVID-19, it’s primarily in the in the elderly population. So the idea of having 75 year olds for us and then 65 plus, year-olds, it makes a lot of sense from the standpoint of trying to reduce deaths, as well as reduce hospitalizations. But we’re going to see things ramp up. I’m at least encouraged by the federal government and the Biden administration for really ramping up the distribution of vaccines to the whole country. I think when a lot of us thought that maybe the fall, by the end of fall, we would be pretty good in the country — it may be by the beginning of summer or the middle of summer when we actually get most of the people vaccinated.