Missouri Healthcare CEO Trying To Reach The Unvaccinated Says People Are Dying Unnecessarily

CBS St. Louis

July 26, 2021

Steve Edwards, the president and CEO of a health care system in Missouri, is troubled that health experts cannot seem to inspire more people to get vaccinated in his area, which is being hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Edwards, of Springfield-based Cox Health, told CNN on Friday that his system has had 534 COVID-19 patients die, with more than 100 of those deaths after vaccines became widely available. None of the patients who died were vaccinated.
He is desperately trying to figure out how to get through to people.

"If I knew how I was missing the mark, we could correct and change," he told CNN's Alisyn Camerota. The community needs 80 to 90% of people to get immunity either from getting inoculated or catching the virus, he said.
"We're not nearly halfway there. This will roar on for quite some time," he said.
He said he thinks the vaccine hesitancy stems from mistrust of the government or institutions. He said doctors have seen patients who didn't get a vaccine because it is under emergency use authorization who ask for monoclonal antibodies -- that are also available under an EUA.
"Someone got into their head that the vaccine is not safe," he said. "It might be the safest vaccine in the history of man. And we somehow have not overcome that."
Edwards said he feels guilty because he is the most prominent voice in the local health care community and people continue to die unnecessarily. He struggles because he thinks his voice could be heard better and he could have save some lives.
"Every vaccine can save a life," he said.
US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said he is concerned because the Delta variant of coronavirus is spreading quickly among unvaccinated people, who account for the vast majority of coronavirus hospitalizations and deaths nationwide.
"The thing that's making this possible is the fact that we are dealing with the most transmissible version of COVID-19 that we've seen to date," he said.
Despite being shown an AP-NORC poll that suggests 45% of people will definitely not get vaccinated, Murthy said: "Well, I'm certainly not giving up on making sure that we continue to work hard to get people vaccinated and I don't think that we've actually reached the limit (on vaccine outreach) yet.
"Every day more than half a million people are making the active choice to get vaccinated. That's a lot of people ... and so we are making progress. We just want to make faster progress."

Rise in hospitalizations is self-inflicted wound, expert says

Health experts blame the recent surges in COVID-19 cases on the low rate of vaccinations. And now the accelerating Delta variant is threatening to increase hospitalizations and deaths as well, one expert said Thursday.
"This is a self-inflicted wound, because we can prevent all of those hospitalizations and deaths -- or at least 98, 99% of them -- if we can encourage vaccination," Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN's Jim Acosta.