Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Gregory Kane, who’s the Jane and Leonard Korman Professor of Pulmonary Medicine and Chair of the Department of Medicine at the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. He’ll be sharing his perspective on building trust with patients during conversations about vaccines. Let’s hear from Dr. Kane now.
Dr. Kane:
I think one of the main messages that we should probably continue to put out there is that vaccination helps. By 2025, the mortality against COVID-19 in the community led to just about 20,000 deaths, which is way down from the peak in 2020 of over 300,000, and in 2021, of between 450,000 and 465,000 deaths.
So we know that immunization and accumulated immunity in the community helps us. What do I mean by accumulated immunity? Patients can get immunity against COVID-19 in two ways. They can get it by having the illness or by the vaccine. It's important for us to remind those patients who've not been sick or have not been diagnosed that they may be more vulnerable to a bad outcome related to COVID-19, and their strategy to promote the vaccine is probably most important. So we need to extend that knowledge to other important respiratory diseases, particularly the viral diseases of influenza and RSV.
Early in the pandemic, I heard clinicians say on public forums that the vaccine is 100 percent safe and that they should get it. I think that was unfortunate. There is no vaccine that is 100 percent safe. All vaccines have a rate of side effects that's real. It's generally low, and the risk-benefit, particularly during outbreaks or epidemics, is usually favorable. I think if we fail to explain to patients that COVID-19 vaccination does carry some risk, then we miss an opportunity to really enhance our trust relationship with our patients. We have to start somewhere, and I think acknowledging that there are some downsides to vaccines is one of the ways in which we can build trust and actually boost the uptake of vaccine utilization among all populations, in all neighborhoods, and across vulnerable populations, importantly, as well.
Announcer:
That was Dr. Gregory Kane discussing strategies for building trust during vaccine conversations. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!
