By Ariel Neidermeier, Sydney Williams, and Keesa Ocampo
Ariel, Keesa and Sydney after brunch in San Francisco. They have been working together for months but hadn’t been able to safely meet in person before this day. #letsgetvaccinated
“Thank you for getting vaccinated,” is a commonly heard refrain during the COVID-19 vaccination process that administers a certain political dose of reality: not everyone is jumping to get the vaccine.
Today, more than half of U.S. adults have received at least one dose of the vaccine. But since early April, daily vaccination rates have plateaued, inspiring widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that herd immunity might never be attained.
Slowing vaccine adoption has also revealed disparities across racial and gender lines. The percent of White people who have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose is 1.6 times higher than the rate for Black people (24%) and 1.5 times higher than the rate for Hispanic people (25%). These disparities persist despite the fact that Black and Hispanic people have higher rates of death and hospitalization to the virus.
On the other hand, Asian people are the most likely to receive a vaccine with 45% of the Asian population in the U.S. receiving at least one dose. This is higher than the 38% of White people who have received the vaccine.
These rates depart further when viewed through the lens of gender: as of early April, statistics showed the vaccine breakdown between women and men was generally close to 60% and 40% in most states.
What accounts for these disparities? Along with preferential access and uneven data reporting, it’s also clear that everything's political, including people’s opinions about the vaccine. Rather than a strictly public health conversation, vaccine adoption has intersected with individuals’ trust in the government. For many minority and ethnic groups, that trust may have been broken in the past.
To confront these realities and perhaps add a more human-centered lens to the conversation, here are three personal stories of the COVID-19 vaccination experience.
Sydney
I received both of my Moderna vaccine shots at the LifeLong Clinic on Ashby in Berkeley, which is my primary care provider by MediCal.
I was vaccinated growing up and have never been afraid of needles. Then, when I was in college, I read a book on the dangers of the MMR vaccine which scared me out of getting vaccines for the following few years. I had let this one piece of material completely change my outlook on vaccine safety and protocol, and truthfully, the book never even mentioned anything about herd immunity, making me doubt its credibility. This is a problem that a lot of us have - believing everything we hear and read without checking our sources!
I decided to get the Moderna vaccine because I wanted to protect myself against the COVID-19 virus and because I didn’t want my friends and loved ones to have to worry about unknowingly being a carrier and infecting me with the virus.
My first shot went smoothly. Getting the shot itself didn't hurt much but I experienced arm soreness for about 4 days following my appointment. Even my second shot was pretty mellow. I did feel some fatigue, achiness and nausea, and certainly made more than my fair share of visits to the oval office (if ya know what i mean :/) for about 48 hours following my second dose. But overall, there’s nothing to write home about (yet, here I am writing about it). And hey, I got some snacks while waiting in observation for 15 mins after each shot, so no complaints here!
As someone who got the Moderna vaccine, whose parents also got Moderna, and whose brothers got the Pfizer vaccines, I encourage everyone in California to get vaccinated too. Aiming for herd immunity is our best bet at returning to normal.
Ariel
I like to think of myself as a go-getter so when I ran into so many challenges getting access to the COVID-19 vaccine before a trip I had planned months ago, I was frustrated to say the least. I had long ago accepted that I probably wouldn’t be able to get a first dose in time for my departure. But, when so many peers in my life got the vaccine by early March, I took matters into my own hands.
I received the first dose of the Moderna vaccine at Kaiser Permanente, Martinez at the end of March. This was accomplished after 4 days of maniacal checking of Walgreens, CVS and Kaiser’s online appointments database on an hourly basis. What worked in the end: waking up at 5:00 AM and checking Kaiser’s availability right when new appointments were added.
I had no reaction to my first dose, other than some lightheaded grogginess a couple of hours later. My second dose, received 36 days later on a Wednesday (you have to wait between 28-42 days between your first and second Moderna dose), was a different story. Nine hours after my shot, I experienced body aches, chills and came down with a fever of 100.4F. Unfortunately, these symptoms lasted for 42 hours. By Friday, I was feeling better and have not had any symptoms or side effects since.
Despite my immune system’s strong reaction, I am so grateful I had the privilege of access to the vaccine. I hope my story helps demystify the process for people who might be hesitant to get vaccinated because of potential symptoms. In this regard, I resonate deeply with feminist icon Dolly Parton’s reaction to the Moderna vaccine, which she helped fund. Taking to Twitter the day she got her first dose, she broke into song to the tune of her much-loved Jolene: “Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine! I’m begging of you, please don’t hesitate.”
One of my few breaks from work was a trek to CVS to get my vaccine. Oddly enough, I chose to wait by all the office supplies for my 15-minute observation window.
Keesa
I got my Pfizer vaccine at the CVS in Fruitvale, Oakland in March and took a photo to remember the day. They asked me to stay in a waiting area 15 minutes after getting the shot, to monitor any immediate reactions. I remember feeling a tingling, spicy feeling throughout my arm but other than that, I was fine. It didn’t come with much, other than a couple of days of arm soreness that’s typical after receiving most vaccines.
A couple years ago, I was scheduled to travel to Ethiopia to film a TV series. Preparing for that trip required vaccinations for yellow fever, hepatitis B, and malaria. Ridiculous as this will sound, I got them all at once. Recalling what that experience was like, I decided that for my second COVID-19 shot, I would block off the next two days for recovery.
I received my second shot a couple weeks later and immediately went back to Zoom meetings and work. Three hours in, my team noticed that I started turning red as a tomato on screen. I began to burn up with a fever. I took a couple Tylenols and went to bed and recall having very vivid night terrors. Was it from my fever? Who knows. A low-grade fever and general sense of malaise persisted for two more days but as planned, I had a clear calendar and lots of time to hydrate, sleep, and boost my immune system.
I hear that not everyone has the same reaction to the Pfizer vaccine. I also hear that some people are still waiting until they can choose which vaccine they get - the one shot of Johnson & Johnson, the Moderna “Jolene” vaccine, Pfizer, or others. Prior to my vaccination, I watched a video by Vox that explained what vaccine efficacy meant and why you can’t really compare COVID-19 vaccines. It opened my eyes and made me realize that whatever was available to me would have to do to reduce my odds of being hospitalized or dying if I ever caught the virus.
Around a month into vaccination, the COVID-19 situation in the Philippines, where my family lives, began to worsen. I was getting horrific daily updates on Viber and Whatsapp. At its peak, the news became dire with reports of a new Philippine strain, that there were no more hospital beds available, that people would drive themselves to the hospital parking lot and wait/sleep in their cars, and that people were dying under tents outside the hospital building. My parents who both have pre-existing conditions were my main concern. Then one day, I received the call I dreaded most: that my father tested positive for COVID-19. They were the worst two weeks of my life. Every day, I was asking about his pain, breathing, signs of blood clots. My father began talking to me about his post-mortem wishes. Thankfully, his was a minor case from which he recovered, albeit developing a rapid heartbeat or arrhythmia. Honestly, I’m just grateful that he’s alive.
Most of my best friends are Indian and our text threads are full of updates about families and entire households fallen ill, about mass cremations in public parks. Today, I heard of cremation grills melting from nonstop use.
All I can think about is how fortunate I was to have access to an inoculation. I’m grateful that I didn’t have to fight for my place in line or scour the black market for excess doses, which is happening in so many countries around the world.
I thought twice about posting my vaccination photo on social media, not wanting to become a poster child for virtue signaling. But I decided that it was going to be a post for me: a remembrance of being the first of my family to receive protection from hospitalization or death from COVID-19, while everyone else in Manila continues to wait.
"The personal is political" was a frequent rallying cry in the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It continues to be an underlying belief among feminists that the personal experiences of women are rooted in their political situation and gender inequality. In the same way, the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has varied drastically on an individual level, revealing radical disparities across socioeconomic, gender and racial lines. It makes sense then that our collective experience of the vaccine would be no different: revealing varying levels of trust in the public health system across different groups.
In feminist terms, “the personal is political” reminds us that when a woman experiences discrimination on a personal level, societal oppression of women is an important factor in understanding said discrimination. In the same way, if individuals are hesitant to get the vaccine, perhaps the best response is to listen to their lived experience with an understanding that their perspective is influenced by historical public health outcomes, cycles of oppression and, ultimately, trust.