‘A lot of people say they’re afraid.’ COVID-19 vaccine fears plague California farmworkers
When Alma Martinez first heard the rumors that COVID-19 vaccine was coming to her small agricultural community in Fresno County, she started worrying. Though she was eager to get vaccinated, she knew too many farmworkers like her had doubts.
“I wanted to get the vaccine because I knew it would make me feel more safe,” she said in Spanish. “But I’ve heard a lot of people say they’re afraid.”
Martinez, 44, toils in the fields picking grapes in Fresno County and has seen firsthand how the virus has spread within her community in the small town of Sanger. Neighbors and other loved ones have fallen ill to the deadly disease, but she said misinformation about the vaccine continues to run rampant — stopping those who need it most from taking it.
“There is a lot of misinformation, and many people think they don’t need it or that it will cause them to get sick or experience side effects,” she said. “Our reality is that we’ve experienced a lot of pain. Many of our family members and friends have died from this virus. But if we don’t protect ourselves with the vaccine, then this crisis will continue.”
As California ramps up its COVID-19 vaccine distribution efforts, some advocates worry farmworkers will be left behind unless support for the vaccine within the agricultural community increases. But that can only happen with the help of grassroots organizations and trusted leaders who can conduct targeted outreach through education campaigns, they argue.
Like many other vulnerable groups, farmworkers hold fears about the safety of the vaccine. Those fears are exacerbated by the community’s distrust of government and a widespread belief that getting vaccinated will mean they could be targeted by immigration enforcement, said Manuel Pastor, director of USC’s Equity Research Institute.
“The disease has ripped its way through immigrant communities,” he said. “This is a population that has a large share of undocumented folks or people from mixed-status families that have been rightly wary of authorities and wasn’t afforded all the proper protections.”
Without the proper mechanisms and community strategies in place, Pastor said agricultural workers — who are predominantly Latino and considered essential — will not be convinced to get vaccinated. The consequences of not getting vaccinated could be devastating to the Latino community, which has already been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, and could potentially slow down the state’s health and economic recovery, he added.
“If one person has COVID, that’s one person too many,” Pastor said. “We can’t accept a situation in which some communities are left behind. No vaccine provision is bad for those communities, and it’s bad for equity, but it’s also bad for the entire society.”
Since the pandemic first hit about a year ago, more than 1.4 million of California’s Latinos have fallen ill from COVID-19, and 20,364 have died, according to the California Department of Public Health. While Latinos make up about 39% of California’s population, they account for about 55% of the state’s coronavirus cases and 46% of deaths, state data shows.
In Fresno County, where more than half of the population is Latino, the most recent data from the county health department shows Latinos represent 44.6% of all cases and 52% of all deaths.
“I know that many of these deaths could’ve been prevented,” said Masha Chernyak, vice president of programs at the Latino Community Foundation. “It’s one thing for us to call our frontline Latino workers essential, and it’s a whole other thing to actually treat them as such.”
Compared to other essential workers, Latinos earn lower wages, have less access to health care, and are less likely to work from home, a recent report from the nonpartisan Milken Institute shows.
That’s why Chernyak said the foundation has been advocating for equitable vaccine distribution in partnership with Latino-led organizations in the Central Valley, Central Coast, and Inland Empire while also focusing on fighting misinformation and leading statewide vaccination events.
Martinez, the farmworker from Sanger, is part of that effort, actively working to dispel some of the rumors and inform those who doubt the vaccine. She said she’s been able to build trust with many of the farmworkers who were initially afraid of getting vaccinated.
“At first, they didn’t feel it was safe,” Martinez said. “But once they saw that many others in the community were getting vaccinated and that they didn’t experience negative side effects and that more information was being released about it, they ended up deciding to go through with it.”
Joe Del Bosque is a farmer from Firebaugh who is leading the effort to vaccinate the farmworker community on the west side of the central San Joaquin Valley. He helped distribute 800 doses to farmers last week after applying with the county when agriculture workers became eligible.
He said many employers offered the vaccines at their worksites to prevent employees from missing a day from work and helped fill out the paperwork on behalf of the workers. Once he gets more vaccines, he’s hoping to organize vaccination events on the weekends.
“For a farmworker, a day of pay is important to them,“ he said. “We want all farmworkers to get vaccinated. We’re trying to make it as easy and as painless as possible for our workers.”
COVID vaccine supply issues also remain a challenge
Pastor said mobile clinics and vaccine pop-up events in rural areas and job sites are crucial to these communities in speeding up the vaccine distribution process. But he said vaccine scarcity is still an issue, and transporting the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to remote places presents challenges. Both vaccines have to be stored at freezing cold temperatures and require two doses.
Once the Pfizer vaccine is removed from cold storage, it remains usable for up to five days when stored at normal refrigeration temperatures, while the Moderna vaccine has a longer shelf life of 30 days.
Pastor said he is “hopeful” Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, which could soon be approved, could help resolve some of those distribution concerns in rural communities, despite it not being as effective as Pfizer’s or Moderna’s. The Pfizer vaccine is 95% effective, and Moderna’s is 94.1% effective.
Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine has an efficacy rate of 66% in protecting against mild cases of the virus, and it is 85% effective in protecting against severe disease. It also has to be stored at freezing temperatures but only requires a single dose and, once thawed, can remain in standard refrigeration for up to three months.
“The Johnson & Johnson (vaccine) has less efficacy against mild disease, but it’s got just as good efficacy against hospitalization and death,” Pastor said. “You’re a little more likely to catch the rough equivalent of the flu, but you’re not going to die. It’s for those places that are pretty far away from the conditions that are necessary for the first two vaccines, which require lots of refrigeration and a very rigorous schedule.”
Still, even with the potential of additional vaccine availability, Chernyak said many farmworkers are still facing barriers to getting vaccinated, like struggling with accessing the internet and county websites that don’t have Spanish instructions, setting up appointments in their communities, or receiving information about the vaccine in their native languages.
Chernyak said the foundation has been leading a public information campaign in multiple languages, increasing funding for small grassroots organizations and putting pressure on state officials to increase vaccine supply to rural areas.
“Mobile efforts to reach the most vulnerable, such as farmworkers and indigenous communities, are critical,” she said. “Right now, the majority of the state’s vaccine supply is still going to those larger coastal cities. We want to establish guidelines to guarantee equity for farmworkers.”
Martinez, who is waiting to get her second dose in early March, is hopeful the vaccine could bring some sense of normalcy back to the region.
“Fear will start to disappear with the more people who get vaccinated and can explain their experiences with their family and friends,” she said. “The sooner we can get vaccinated, the sooner we can get on back to our normal lives.”
This story was originally published February 23, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘A lot of people say they’re afraid.’ COVID-19 vaccine fears plague California farmworkers."