Last week, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said that COVID-19 is “becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” President Joe Biden said much the same

America Is Getting Unvaccinated People All Wrong

submited by
Style Pass
2021-07-24 19:00:02

Last week, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said that COVID-19 is “becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” President Joe Biden said much the same shortly after. They are technically correct. Even against the fast-spreading Delta variant, the vaccines remain highly effective, and people who haven’t received them are falling sick far more often than those who have. But their vulnerability to COVID-19 is the only thing that unvaccinated people universally share. They are disparate in almost every way that matters, including why they haven’t yet been vaccinated and what it might take to persuade them. “‘The unvaccinated’ are not a monolith of defectors,” Rhea Boyd, a pediatrician and public-health advocate in the San Francisco Bay Area, tweeted on Saturday.

Boyd has been talking to underserved communities about COVID-19 vaccines since November, before any were even formally authorized. Together with several partner organizations, she co-developed a national campaign called The Conversation, in which Black and Latino health-care workers provide information (and dispel misinformation) about the vaccines. She has spoken virtually to dozens of community groups, including churches and schools, fielding their questions about the shots. I reached out to Boyd because I wanted to know what she has learned through all these encounters about why some people are still unvaccinated and what to do about it.

Leave a Comment