‘Cynical forces,’ vaccine misinformation mean COVID likely lingers, Fresno’s top doc says
Viral outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics like COVID-19 are not unusual in U.S. history. But the response to the coronavirus pandemic, and the vaccines and treatments for the disease, are much different now than some previous public health crises.
It’s been decades since two previous viral scourges, polio and smallpox, have appeared in the U.S. The polio virus was largely eradicated in the U.S. in the late 1970s, and the last American case of smallpox was in 1949.
Dr. Rais Vohra, Fresno County’s interim health officer, said that history is not likely to repeat itself when it comes to the potential of stamping out COVID-19. Instead, he said Friday, the coronavirus and the sometimes deadly respiratory disease it causes “will just circulate (in society) and unfortunately keep finding new victims.”
“Everyone agrees that COVID is not going to go away,” Vohra told reporters. “We have such a large pool of people that are not vaccinated, or are immunocompromised, or if new variants start to cause reinfections in people that already had infections or vaccinations before that aren’t working as effectively, then all of those will contribute” to the coronavirus becoming endemic, or an enduring disease, for years to come.
A pandemic, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, is “an event in which a disease spreads across several countries and affects a large number of people.” So far, the World Health Organization reports that COVID-19 has infected almost 268 million people in nearly 200 countries around the world, and killed almost 5.3 million people.
A disease becomes “endemic” when it is “regularly found among particular people in a certain area,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
“Just like the common cold or even influenza, it’s just going to become something that all of us are going to be aware of and deal with as best we can,” Vohra said. “I think that’s the most realistic scenario at this point, and almost no one is even talking about going down to a transmission rate of zero.”
Since March 2020, when the first local case of COVID-19 was confirmed, almost 146,000 people in Fresno County have tested positive for the coronavirus; of those, thousands have gotten sick enough to require hospitalization, and nearly 2,300 people have died from the respiratory disease and its complications.
The obstacles to eradicating this disease go well beyond the biology of the virus itself, Vohra said, although “this darned virus is just so tricky, it just keeps finding new ways to evade whatever layers of protection we think of.”
The concerns include the willingness of people to embrace those “layers of protection” including vaccines and other public health advice such as masking, social distancing and avoiding crowds where the virus can spread from person to person.
Wiping out COVID-19 in the same way that dreaded smallpox and polio were eradicated, he said, is simply unrealistic. “Certainly it can be done,” Vohra said, “but it would require a much greater level of coordination and buying into the science and the public health advice than what we’re seeing right now.”
Vohra added that he’s moved beyond the disappointment that COVID-19 vaccines were not met with the same enthusiasm as vaccines for polio and smallpox. “That really used to bum me out,” he said. “But I think we just need to realize that we’re living in a different country and a different time right now.”
While vaccines against COVID-19 have been available in the United States for almost a year, through Thursday almost 420,000 people in Fresno County – almost 40% of the overall population – remain unvaccinated against the coronavirus, yet to receive even one dose of any of the three vaccine products authorized for use by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.
In addition to skepticism over science and hesitation about the vaccines, “there’s other cynical forces that are able to get into people’s living rooms a lot faster,” Vohra said. “As easy as it is to transmit good information, it’s unfortunately just as easy to transmit misinformation. I think that will really hamper our efforts to get people vaccinated in time.”
This story was originally published December 11, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
