ON THE COVER
Gov. Gavin Newsom receives the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza in Los Angeles on April 1, 2021. Photo by Shae Hammond for CalMatters
Carrots, Sticks and Jabs
What will California do to win over vaccine skeptics? By Ben Christopher/CalMatters newsroom@northcoastjournal.com
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eginning April 1, all Californians 50 and older became eligible to get their coveted COVID-19 vaccine — including one politically imperiled 53-year-old governor. Gov. Gavin Newsom celebrated this latest benchmark by getting a well-publicized jab himself, thus marking the beginning of the end of what has been a particularly thorny political challenge for the administration: How to make sure the millions of Californians eager to get a vaccine are able to get one. Now it’s on to the next challenge: How to vaccinate the millions of Californians who aren’t quite so eager. A survey released recently by the Public Policy Institute of California found that 14 percent of adult respondents said they would “definitely not get the vaccine.” Another 7 percent said they “probably”
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wouldn’t. That suggests that one in five Californians will need, at the very least, some extra convincing. With new more virulent and lethal mutations of the novel coronavirus now rippling through the unvaccinated population, public health experts say convincing those “vaccine hesitant” holdouts is an urgent concern — not just for the unvaccinated, but for everyone. “This is like a shapeshifter of a virus, so if we don’t do it now, then we may have to vaccinate everybody else again if some new super variant comes on board,” said Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease physician at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. In the early days of the pandemic, epidemiologists estimated that roughly 70 percent of the population would need to acquire some degree of immunity to the
NORTH COAST JOURNAL • Thursday, April 8, 2021 • northcoastjournal.com
virus — either by getting sick and developing antibodies or by receiving a vaccine — to slow transmission to a containable rate. The new variants raise that figure to reach “herd immunity” to about 85 percent, said Chin-Hong. But many state lawmakers and public health officials say it’s still too early to consider resorting to mandates or other coercive measures that have already proven contentious to goad people to wear masks during the pandemic. “Rather than coming out with a hammer right away,” said North Coast Assemblymember Jim Wood, a Santa Rosa Democrat who leads the Assembly health committee, the state should use the next few months to “identify what the major barriers are, educate people, provide information, reassurance, contact the people
that have the most influence … and see where we end up.”
A “continuum of coercion” Wood and his colleagues have good reason to tread carefully. In 2019, the acrimonious debate over a bill making it more difficult for parents to exempt their school-aged children from routine vaccine requirements ended with a protester literally raining blood onto the floor of the state Senate. During the pandemic, irate anti-vaccine protesters have been regular fixtures at legislative hearings. In January, two activists issued warnings to lawmakers — particularly sinister in the days following the storming of the U.S. Capitol — that a vaccine mandate of any kind would
