‘They’re not anti-vaccine.’ Why there’s hope Fort Worth holdouts might get a COVID shot
Maria Perez is scared for her two teenage boys, who returned to high school Monday amid a surge of COVID-19 cases.
But she’s also unsure about the COVID-19 vaccine; she doesn’t know if, as a 51-year-old with chronic health conditions, she should take the shot.
“I hear everything: You get sick, and a lot of people have been having problems after they get the shot. So I don’t know,” Perez said. “I’m kind of debating if I’m going to get it or not.”
With plenty of shots available, some have begun voicing frustration and anger at the as-of-yet unvaccinated, particularly as the delta variant has pushed up case counts.
But community leaders and residents themselves say it’s a mistake to think the unvaccinated are all anti-vaxxers or that they’ll remain unvaccinated forever.
“They’re not anti-vaccine,” said the Rev. Michael Bell, pastor of the 400-person Greater St. Stephen First Church. “Conspiracy … does not drive the people that I’ve talked to.”
In Texas, poorer neighborhoods and neighborhoods with high Latino and Black populations tend to have lower vaccination rates than their richer and whiter neighbors in major cities, according to an analysis of state data by The Texas Tribune.
To better understand why many people have not gotten vaccinated, the Star-Telegram visited Diamond Hill, a neighborhood that is 80% Hispanic and has one of the lowest vaccination rates in Tarrant County. In five visits over nine days, the Star-Telegram interviewed 46 residents, 18 of whom were not vaccinated.
Of those who had not been vaccinated, four people said they had already decided they would not get the vaccine, 12 had concerns or questions but were still willing to consider getting vaccinated, and two people gave unclear answers. Factors included possible side effects, confusion from misinformation and trepidation over unanswered questions.
The interviews support the belief of many community leaders that a significant portion of unvaccinated people could be convinced to take the vaccine.
“It’s not going to be as rapid as any of the officials would like, or even the medical society [would] like, but it is going to go up,” said the Rev. Karen Harris, the executive coordinator at Community Food Bank. But “I think it will happen.”
The stakes are high. With the highly contagious delta variant circulating, medical experts say vaccination is the best available tool in fighting the virus — and fighting toward normalcy.
Vaccination status
In Texas, vaccinations have picked up again as the delta variant spreads.
About 65% of Texans 12 and older have received at least one dose, according to state data; that’s several points behind the national figure of about 70%, according to federal data. Tarrant County has also seen an uptick in vaccinations in recent weeks, but falls behind the state and national numbers.
About 58% of Tarrant County residents 12 or older have received at least one dose, according to county data. But some neighborhoods fall well below that average. Among Tarrant County ZIP codes with full vaccination data, five have vaccination rates below 40% (a sixth ZIP code has a similarly low rate, but is excluded here because it covers almost exclusively TCU’s campus and has an unusually small population). Four of those five ZIP codes are majority Black or majority Hispanic.
CDC data shows that Black and Hispanic people are significantly more likely to be hospitalized with and die from COVID-19. And low vaccination rates in those communities means those residents could continue to be disproportionately hospitalized and killed.
But low vaccination rates don’t just affect the unvaccinated. With opportunities to circulate, the virus could mutate, making the vaccine potentially less effective, said Tarrant County public health director Vinny Taneja.
“If we continue to give this virus the opportunity to mutate, we’re probably going to have to figure out new vaccine or boosted vaccine and all those types of things,” he said. “And I’d rather us just all get vaccinated and get back to normal.”
In Texas, officials and community leaders don’t have many other tools to slow the spread of COVID-19. Gov. Greg Abbott has banned business restrictions or mask mandates (although a number of school districts have defied the governor’s order).
“What I can do is I can make sure that we have test sites available where if people need to get tested, they can go get tested. And then if they’re interested in vaccines, we can make sure that there are enough places available or that the vaccines are readily available,” said Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley. “And really that’s about all we could do right now.”
Taneja said residents fall into three buckets when it comes to the vaccine. There are the so-called “early adopters,” who were first in line to get vaccinated. Then there are those who are hesitant, who were initially on the fence or just didn’t get around to it early on. And finally, there are the staunchly opposed, the “true anti-vaxxers” who are unlikely to get vaccinated.
The staunchly opposed folks, Taneja said, tend to be vocal, but they’re also in the minority. The majority of unvaccinated folks, Taneja said, are in the middle bucket.
“It’s just that ... they’ve heard some misconceptions about the vaccine and they’re waiting to see what happens,” Taneja said.
Why many are still on the fence
The unvaccinated Diamond Hill residents who spoke with the Star-Telegram listed a variety of reasons for their vaccination status.
Some people were worried about the side effects and whether they would force them to miss work. Others had been exposed to misinformation online, sharing concerns about an unsafe magnetic vaccine that could affect their fertility.
Some said they wanted to get the vaccine, but they had been so busy with work or childcare duties that they hadn’t had the time. Multiple people questioned how well the vaccine works if people still became infected after getting it. All but one unvaccinated resident acknowledged the severity of the disease.
Perez, the Diamond Hill mom, has questions she wants to ask her primary care doctor when she has a checkup this month.
“Does it help your immune system?” Perez asked. “I want to ask her if it’s good for me to get it.”
But Perez, like Fort Worth residents and Americans across the country, also has to grapple with a barrage of misinformation about the vaccine from sources less credible than her doctor. While sitting at her kitchen table on a recent August afternoon, she pulled out her phone to play a Facebook video of a physician assistant speaking at a school board meeting in South Texas. During the video, the health care worker repeats false information about masks, the safety of the vaccine and the prevalence of COVID-19.
Perez said she was wrestling with the contents of the video. She found the man’s comments interesting — she even watched the video twice — but she also acknowledged COVID-19 is a real and serious threat.
“My daughter had it, one of my sons had it, so it’s like, how is it not real?” she said.
Juan Morgan, 55, also said he has trouble keeping up with all the changing information he sees on the news. He said he remains unvaccinated because he doesn’t think it’s necessary. Morgan said he already has antibodies from contracting COVID-19 in December, which he believes is equivalent to what the vaccine would provide. Experts agree that antibodies from the vaccine likely offer longer-lasting immunity when compared to antibodies obtained by infection.
The shot “makes me a little nervous, I’ll be honest,” Morgan said in Spanish. He said he thinks the vaccine was developed too quickly and that he’s unsure of the long-term effects.
He’s also heard stories from his native country, Ecuador, where people have died shortly after getting the vaccine, which also puts him on edge.
There’s no rush, he said. “Hold on. Let’s see what happens later on.”
That wait-and-see approach is something the Rev. William Glynn — the senior pastor at Mount Olive Baptist Missionary Church, which has about 1,500 congregants in Morningside — hears often.
He said many of his unvaccinated congregants have concerns because of misinformation they’ve seen on social media or mistrust in medicine stemming from medical abuse such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. But recently, most unvaccinated people have softened their tone, he said.
“One of the general things they’d say … ‘I’m waiting,’” Glynn said. “My followup is always, ‘Waiting on what? Are you waiting to get the virus? What are you waiting on?’”
Diamond Hill resident Greg Franklin, 38, said he was worried about how quickly the vaccine had been developed. But Franklin said he’s spent the last 18 months strenuously trying to avoid COVID-19, which has killed more than 50,000 Texans. He wears a mask, and usually gloves, when he leaves the house, he said.
“They kind of came up with the vaccine pretty fast,” he said. “I kind of don’t trust it, and I know a few people that have gotten the vaccine, and they actually have the second variant of COVID.”
Franklin said he hadn’t decided whether he’d get the vaccine — “I’m kind of in the middle” — but that he planned to talk to his doctor about it during his upcoming annual checkup.
Dr. Patricia Rodriguez, a pediatrician and the chief medical officer at North Texas Area Community Health Centers, said patients have a wide variety of motivations for not getting vaccinated. But the immediate side effects after vaccinations, which can include flu-like symptoms for a day or two, are a frequent concern.
“There’s a myriad of reasons,” Rodriguez said. “What I hear the most is that they’re ‘afraid of getting sick.’ … They’re not thinking long-term effects, they’re thinking in the short term.”
Yesenia Cerda, also of Diamond Hill, worries about those side effects because she doesn’t know if she’d be able to take time off work. Cerda’s wife, though, is a fully-vaccinated health care worker.
Her wife has been trying to convince her to get vaccinated, but she’s still not sure, she said.
The 31-year-old said it was a hassle to find the time to get the shot and that doctor’s offices make her nervous. She said she could be convinced if someone could go with her.
‘We’ve got to keep working’
There isn’t one single solution to the problem of low vaccination rates, community leaders say. Wide-ranging concerns require wide-ranging strategies.
Glynn, the Mount Olive pastor, pointed to a one-size-fits-all mentality as an explanation for the low vaccination rates in some neighborhoods.
“Basically every city, county has had one general rollout,” Glynn said. “Well, you can’t do that when you’ve got different communities and racial makeups. The rollout for south Fort Worth can’t be the same rollout that you would use in west Fort Worth.”
And particularly in communities that don’t trust medical institutions — including Black communities where memories of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and other medical abuses may still loom large — the message is more likely to stick if it comes from a local leader.
At Community Food Bank, Harris, the executive coordinator, and executive director Regena Taylor said the staff and volunteers were hit with a cluster of COVID-19 cases in late 2020. A number of people, including Harris and Taylor, got sick.
Seeing other people struggle with, or die from, the virus is a strong motivator for vaccination, Taylor said.
“People start dying around them, they start seeing,” Taylor said. “They start seeing and they’ll say … ‘I said I wasn’t going to get it, but I’m going to get that shot now. People are dying.’”
So when unvaccinated residents come into the food bank, Harris and Taylor tell their story. They tell residents that, yes, the vaccine might leave them feeling groggy or unwell for a couple days. But it’s better than getting sick with COVID-19; it’s better than dying.
Depending on their role in the community, local leaders may take different approaches.
Among Glynn’s congregants, for instance, he said a number have decided to get vaccinated after he brought it up repeatedly on Sundays and during other church programs. It helped, too, that he was one of the “early adopters” and is therefore living proof that the vaccine is safe.
Bell, the pastor of Greater St. Stephen, said that some of his congregants explicitly told him that they were keeping an eye on him.
“When I got vaccinated ... people were watching this and they would tell me, ‘I’m going to see what’s going to happen to you before I get vaxxed,’” Bell said.
He estimated that about 25 people eventually decided to get vaccinated “after they saw that I was still walking.”
And while some Fort Worth neighborhoods have vaccination rates well below the county, state and national average, local leaders say there’s still a chance that could change.
“We’re moving just past those early adopters, honestly, and then now we’ve got to keep working,” said Rodriguez, of the North Texas Areas Community Health Centers. “We can definitely move the needle, for sure.”
This story was originally published August 18, 2021 at 5:25 AM.
