VA Latinos Encouraged To Keep Getting Vaccinated For COVID-19: NHMA

HERNDON, VA — Dr. Sergio Rimola, a Herndon-based physician, is concerned that many in the Latino community are getting tired of COVID-19 and not getting vaccinated.

"We are in a situation of the pandemic right now that we are having these variants such as the BA.5, which is now very contagious," said Rimola, who co-chaired the D.C. metro chapter of the National Hispanic Medical Association in 2020. "They're forgetting about the vaccines that even though they will not prevent any infection, they are going to make the person less likely to end up in the hospital or dying."

NHMA originally launched its Vaccinate for All campaign back in 2020 with the Centers for Disease Control and the U.S. Department off Health and Human Service to address the disparity between Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups in contracting COVID-19.

"The Latino community was disproportionately affected by COVID 19 infections, number of hospitalizations and deaths," Rimola said.

From January 2020 through February 2021, 129 Hispanic people out of 100,000 died from COVID-19, which was a higher mortality rate compared to those in the Black (107) or white (61) racial/ethnic groups, according to Virginia Department of Health data.

For overall cases during that same time period, VDOH reported that those in the Hispanic population was 2.1 percent more likely to contract COVID-19 than those who were white.

The disparities stemmed from a number of reasons, according to Rimola, including a lack of available health information in Spanish and low health literacy levels.

"Many of the Latinos were essential workers," he said. "They didn't have the proper equipment to get protected. They live in multi-family apartments with several people living there. They have to use public transportation and they have no health insurance."

At one point in 2020, 65 percent of the COVID-19 cases were from the Latino population, according to Rimola.

Once effective vaccines were approved to treat COVID-19, NHMA, which represents 50,000 doctors across the U.S., worked with the CDC and HHS to develop the Vaccinate for All campaign to motivate the Latino community to get vaccinated.

"Traditionally, Latinos are less likely to receive vaccines for many reasons," Rimola said. "We have seen that with flu we needed to do a very long campaign trying to tackle the misinformation, all the beliefs that some people have about vaccines in general."

One approach was enlist the help of community leaders who were viewed as communicators of trustful communicators among local Latino groups. With the help of local physicians, these "Champions for Vaccine for All" helped to share information about health care resources and vaccination opportunities.

"This is not only doing communications through Twitter and Facebook or through newspapers and Latino outlets like Univision and Telemundo, but also doing vaccination campaigns with the community health centers and doing the actual vaccinations," Rimola said.

Recently, NHMA and its local partners brought a famous Mexican soccer player to a vaccination clinic in Nebraska. "He was able to get a lot of Latinos to come to this event and get vaccinated," Rimola said.

One of the reasons Latinos were hesitant to get vaccinated in the early days of the pandemic was that some of the initial information transmitted via the Internet relied on Google Translate, which was sometimes not accurate and presented incorrect information.

NHMA worked with local health care providers on how to more effectively communicate with their Latino patients about vaccines.

"One of the things that we advise, for example, not only the Fairfax County Health Department, but also the Virginia Department of Health, that those translations needed to be monitored and done in a way that was more professional," Rimola said. "Latinos in this area, they have limited English proficiency. Some cannot read and therefore those communications are not as effective. So we use a lot of social media communications through info Infograms."

NHMA has also conducted health literacy webinars for health care providers, including doctors and nurse practitioners, to train them how to talk to their Latino patients about vaccinations.

Although the Latino population in Virginia faced many disparities when it came to COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic, NHMA's efforts helped to turn things around when it came to vaccinations.

Looking at the percentage of the population by race and ethnicity who were eligible to be vaccinated in Virginia, 83.8 percent of the Latino population had at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the latest VDOH data. For comparison, only 67.5 percent of eligible white population had at least one dose of the vaccine.