With the holiday season upon us and families gathering for Thanksgiving, public health officials are preparing for the respiratory virus season to ramp up and for January — when Donald Trump will return to the White House.
Several public health officials joined forces Thursday to discuss the importance and efficacy of routine vaccines, as flu and RSV start to increase nationally, with COVID almost certain to follow suit.
The panel, hosted by the Big Cities Health Coalition, a group that works with the nation’s largest urban health departments, included Santa Clara County’s Health Officer, Dr. Sara Cody, and the public health officers from Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, Shelby County, Tennessee, and Columbus, Ohio.
“Vaccines are one of the cheapest and simplest tools we have in our prevention toolbox,” said Dr. Raynard Washington, director of the Public Health Department for Mecklenburg County.
While they all emphasized the efficacy of vaccines, and the importance of getting the word out, the public health officials also acknowledged a new approach for communicating with the public is necessary, because misinformation and distrust of vaccines has only grown in recent years amid the pandemic, and well-known vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is set to be Trump’s nominee as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Cody and the others emphasized the importance of a hyper-local focus when it comes to public health, and meeting people where they are.
“It’s that kind of hyper-local engagement that will help us go against any sort of misinformation or disinformation that’s out there,” Washington said.
“We need to understand what people are hearing, what people are making of the information that they have,” Cody said, “and I think our strategies are changing away from telling and more to listening and understanding.”
Cody led the Bay Area’s first-in-the-nation coronavirus lockdown in March of 2020, facing harsh criticism from some over the economic implications, and praise from others for helping limit the spread of the deadly virus.
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Despite the challenges, Cody said her agency is in a better place than it was four years ago. “We faced a lot of headwinds during the pandemic, but we met them,” said Cody. “The infrastructure and trust that we built locally is more robust than it was prior to the pandemic.”
As for the current status of respiratory viruses in Santa Clara County? “COVID looks pretty low in our wastewater, however, we are starting to see an uptick in flu and RSV,” she said. And while vaccine skeptics may be getting more prominent positions in the federal government, Cody said local data shows more residents are vaccinated now than at this time last year.
”Even though our rates are low, we are still doing better than last year,” Cody said.