CDC Comes to Port Jervis to Listen
Anne Horsham said she was furious but polite when an Orange County health department representative approached her at a Church St. Park community barbecue in Port Jervis to ask her views about Covid-19 vaccines. Horsham was doing crafts with children at that moment.
“I was taken aback. We were doing a community event with kids,” she said. “I love Ashley. Who would have thought we’d end up on opposite sides? She said they’re doing listening events because Port Jervis is so under-vaccinated.”
Horsham is dubious about the vaccines and cites videos, passed around on social media, accusing the federal government of lying about vaccine safety evidence. The accusations appear to stem from the accusers’ misinterpretations of research data, such as what is collected in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.
Later, Orange County Deputy Health Commissioner Chris Ericson explained in an email that U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) representatives had joined health department staff at the event “to talk to people about their perspective on vaccinations.”
“They absolutely were not trying to convince anyone to get vaccines, although we have seen the social media related to this, because this was not the purpose of the interviews,” he said.
Horsham had conveyed her disapproval to the health department member on Facebook, saying “You should rethink the push-in model.”
What prompted the visit , however, was concern about the low percentage of vaccinated Port Jervis residents and high rate of Covid-19 among them compared to the rest of the county.
“As of today, the vaccination rate by zip code for Port Jervis (12771) for persons with a completed vaccine series is 39.4%,” Ericson wrote in an email. “In the last seven days (8/10-8/16), Port Jervis (the City- not the zip code) has reported 32 cases. However, that is a rate of 373.9 per 100,000 compared to 205.5 per 100,000 in the same time period for the county overall. So it seems like a small number of cases but the City of Port Jervis is pretty small.”
These statistics are troubling because, across the country, where vaccination rates are lower, hospitalization and death rates from Covid-19 are higher. For example, in Louisiana, where the vaccination rate is 39%, like Port Jervis, the hospitalization rate is 58 and death rate is 1.2 per 100,000. In contrast, in New York overall, the vaccination rate is 59% , with a hospitalization rate of 11 and .09 death rate per 100,000, according to the New York Times. So Louisiana has five times the hospitalization rate of New York and ten times the death rate for Covid-19.
Doug Manion, of Milford, an infectious disease specialist, pointed out that more than 99.9% of deaths from Covid-19 now occur among unvaccinated people. The Delta variant of the virus, which carriers shed in much greater quantities than the earlier virus, has resulted in more breakthrough infections among the vaccinated, but those infections tend to be milder than among the unvaccinated, he said.
Meanwhile, he noted, unvaccinated children are getting infected at 14 times the rate of their infection in June, with many more hospitalized and dying or getting complicating illnesses later—some dying from those.
“The best public health measure we have to control the pandemic is vaccination. Sadly COVID-19 or variants of it, will be with us for at least the foreseeable future if not forever.”