SURVEY: Vaccine Preference Report of Residents in Hudson and Bergen Counties in New Jersey
HealCo Findings Support Need To Prioritize Decentralized Access & Convenience
December news of COVID-19 vaccination approval gave a glimmer of promise to the end of the deadliest year in US history. Fast forward to early March 2021, the U.S. has administered 78 million doses to citizens across states and territories — often inefficiently.
In January 2021, murmurs of wasted doses and poor operational planning surrounding the vaccine began to circulate. The United States’ vaccine distribution to date can be considered a disaster when compared to other countries like Israel, where 50% of the population had received at least one dose of the vaccine by late February. Local officials scrambled to create their own vaccination strategies, draining millions of tax-payer dollars along the way.
So, what’s the hold up? Supply chain mismanagement, vaccine condition specificities, and changes in projections have all led to confusion on which vaccine will be available, when it will be available, and who it will be available to.
As an organization obsessed with bringing care to vulnerable and underserved communities, our team at HealCo looks to data as a tangible solution. Our initiative to launch a survey and gain insight into vaccine preferences sought to guide local officials in planning and coordinating vaccine deployment.
We started with select areas through Hudson and Bergen Counties — deploying our survey to over 11,000 residents. Answers to the survey were not used to schedule a vaccine appointment, but rather to provide meaningful insights to physician practices and local pharmacies in HealCo’s Health System Without Walls about the availability and desire of their patients to get vaccinated.
Of those who responded to our survey, 34% indicated that they either have an underlying health condition, or that they are over the age of 65. Of that group, only one of respondents said that they are not interested in getting a vaccine.
Vaccine Brand Preferences for Jersey City residents:
Pfizer (2 doses): 21.9%
Moderna (2 doses): 20.8%
Johnson & Johnson (1 dose): 8.6%
No preference: 48.7%
As a side note, HealCo CEO Kirat Kharode endured his own frustrating experience when it came to booking vaccination appointments for his two eligible parents:
“I entered New Jersey’s vaccine Hunger Games and this is what I learned.
After hours of waiting online during the wee hours one Saturday, following “NJ Vaccine Hunter” Facebook groups, exchanging alpha-numeric coded late night messages to “Vaccine Angels” (Medicare numbers of my parents), trolling bots on Twitter who monitor the activity of CVS, Rite Aid, and municipal vaccination sites, and refreshing a page on my computer several hundred times over a 2.5 hour span, I nearly gave up in finding my parents a COVID-19 vaccine. Desperate, I glanced out across the Hudson River and saw the open sign of a major drug-store chain.
Out of curiosity, I looked into appointments. Not only did the NYC drug stores have multiple available time slots for vaccinations, but many were geographically closer to me than the vaccination sites I was looking into in my own state. How could the vaccine be so disproportionately dispersed? How could the process be so technologically cumbersome?
Frustrated and infuriated, I was about to close my computer — but alas, a credible message from a Facebook source: CVS in Union City, NJ had openings. Scrambling quickly, I was only able to secure a vaccine for his father, leaving my mother without.
By now, the sun was rising and the children of the house were fighting for time on the computer for meaningless non-vaccine pursuits. I thought about recruiting them as volunteers (the younger one is gifted with the iPad). Oh wait! A bot from the Twitter vaccine army pinged again — a listing CVS Union City. Could it be? It was! After 3 hours and 43 minutes, I had finally advanced to the next round of the New Jersey Vaccine games.
The next round? Yes, it wouldn’t be easy convincing senior citizens to move around their schedules to get a vaccine in distant (for them) Union City, NJ. I’d have to wait for them to wake up to find out.”
It is important to note that, as of today, only 8.2% of New Jersey’s population has both doses of the vaccine, according to NPR’s daily vaccine tracker. Our local leaders have a long way to go, but HealCo’s mission to close the care disparity gap through data-driven technology will hopefully guide their continued efforts.
While vaccine distribution remains a top priority, our team refuses to ignore the mental health crisis surging alongside the pandemic. Research suggests that 1 in 5 people who have contracted the COVID-19 virus will develop some sort of mental health issue. Dedicated to bringing health and wellness resources, both physical and virtual, to those who need it, HealCo offers free mental health care consultations through its network of licensed therapists.
If you’d like to join our Health System Without Walls network as a provider and offer these services to your patients, contact hswow@healco.us.
For more on current vaccine eligibility, go to https://covid19.nj.gov.
