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California’s wealthy county, just north of San Francisco, has one of the highest covid-19 vaccination rates in the country after years of being known to parents who opposed shots for formative years illnesses.
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By Soumya Karlamangla
SAN RAFAEL, Calif. — For more than a decade, few places in the country have been more linked to anti-vaccine movements than Marin County, the peninsula covered in coastal redwood cliffs and striking views just north of San Francisco.
This corner of the Bay Area had become a prime example of a thriving, highly informed network with low vaccination rates in the formative years, led by a contingent of liberal parents skeptical of classical medicine. Marin was a paradox to the classic Democrats, and a punching bag. In 2015, during a measles outbreak in California, comedian Jon Stewart blamed Marin’s parents for “conscious stupidity. “
But Marin is no longer the anti-vaccine capital.
In the era of the pandemic, getting vaccinated against Covid-19 has the litmus test “vax” or “antivax”, and for this reason, Marin County has followed vaccinations at rates that exceed the vast majority of communities in the country. This comes after public health efforts to replace parental opinions, as well as a strict state mandate that students be vaccinated against formative years diseases.
And as the country has become more polarized, Marinians are less comfortable dressed in the increasingly conservative “anti-vaccine” label. Americans who identify as Democrats are more than twice as likely to be vaccinated and hardened against Covid, and Marin County is one of the bluest enclaves in America.
“Getting vaccinated is great,” said Naveen Kumar, medical director of Kaiser Permanente San Rafael Medical Center.
Dr. Kumar said some of Marin’s parents who were hesitant about vaccines were convinced through their children’s enthusiasm, which they witnessed among their teenage son and his friends. “Vaccinated?” he said. You almost become an outcast if you are not vaccinated. “
Among five- to 11-year-olds, 80% of Marin County has its two Covid vaccines, more than double state or national rates. The rate among young people under five is more than five times higher than in the country.
Since one-fifth of the number one school-age youth here have not yet been vaccinated, it is not transparent that Marin’s resisters have replaced their minds. But parents who oppose vaccines no longer feel as empowered to voice their opinions. swing ostensibly captured through a local columnist, who said in January: “Not vaccinated?He is not welcome in Marin.
Julie Schiffman, 50, doesn’t have her Covid vaccines; She said she believed vaccines would worsen her many autoimmune diseases. Because she is unvaccinated, she was excluded from Marin’s homeschooling meetings she had attended for years, even though parents in the past didn’t care if someone had been vaccinated. The first time, she says, she feels that other people here despise her on principle.
Schiffman said that when her children were young, she didn’t vaccinate them because of similar considerations about vaccine side effects. The prestige of his vaccines has never been a factor for student enrollment because he homeschooled them.
But due to social tension to get vaccinated against covid, children received covid vaccines last year. Her 13-year-old son “wanted to be on the front lines,” Schiffman said. “I’m the only one in my circle of relatives who hasn’t. “
Across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, Marin County features strikingly beautiful scenery and lush forested neighborhoods. The domain was once largely composed of farms and small communities, with a population committed to living off the land.
The county became more bohemian in the 1960s and 1970s with the arrival of the countercultural diaspora to get away from the chaos of San Francisco. The Grateful Dead lived in a commune here in 1966, and Otis Redding wrote “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” while on a houseboat across from Sausalito.
Marin is also a bastion of wealth, with California’s highest median joint income source in 2019 at $178,755. On weekends, luxury cars outperform cyclists on the most sensible high-end motorcycles on the roads to the wonderful Pacific. Gov. Gavin Newsom lived with his family on a hill in Marin, with three Tesla cars in his driveway, the New Yorker wrote.
By 2011, the percentage of Marin County kindergarten children who had all required vaccinations (78%) had fallen to fifth place among California’s 58 counties. Outbreaks of whooping cough fueled by low vaccination rates sent young children to the hospital.
At the time, Willis was running as an epidemiologist for a branch of the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U. S. government responds to global outbreaks. In 2010, it sent to Haiti after a major earthquake severely limited access to vaccines.
The following year, he was sent to his hometown in Marin County, where he was speechless by what he found. “Elsewhere, I had worked on vaccines, it was purely logistical and operational, and here it was a matter of belief, which was much harder to break. “
Dr. Willis left CDCet in 2013 and took over as Marin County Health Officer, and was determined to understand why relatively few parents vaccinate their children.
It surveyed parents of thousands of kindergarteners to get their thoughts on vaccines. On the list were autism, vaccine ingredients and the speed at which young children get dozens of vaccines. A 1998 study claimed to link the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to discredited and retracted autism, but only after boosting the anti-vaccine movement, especially among skeptical parents of classical medicine and pharmaceutical companies.
Dr. Willis introduced public fitness campaigns to address those fears in particular and prepared local pediatricians to have those conversations as well. Their efforts were spurred when, in late 2014, a measles outbreak broke out at Disneyland, drawing more attention to unvaccinated children. . When cases spread to Marin County, its low vaccination rates were a glaring example in California.
At the same time, 6-year-old Rhett Krawitt, who was then living in Corte Madera, struggles with leukemia and is too medically fragile to be immune to measles. An infection can kill you. Sitting in his garden this summer, home to a thriving vegetable lawn and pickleball court, his father, Carl Krawitt, recalled how Rhett’s oncologist suggested they ask their classmates’ parents to vaccinate their children.
When they did, it seemed like parents who had walked away from vaccines didn’t fully realize that there can be genuine consequences for other people, M said. Krawitt. ” Once they figured out, they went out and got vaccinated,” M. Krawitt.
Rhett, then a blond boy with a circular face, spoke at the state Capitol to urge lawmakers to pass a stricter vaccination requirement sparked by the measles outbreak. The law, which requires all California youth to be vaccinated to attend school, passed. it happened in the summer of 2015. Vaccination rates increased in Marin County and the state.
“A lot of other building blocks have led to a big change,” said Rhett, now a 14-year-old boy who has since received all his vaccinations against diseases from formative years and covid-19. He spends a lot more time thinking about sailing, his favorite pastime, those days.
In the 2019-2020 school year, the vaccination rate for Marin County youth was about 95 percent, in the middle of the state’s package rather than near the bottom.
And then the pandemic hit.
The county is one of the first regions in the country to put a stay-at-home order in effect in March 2020. Compliance with social distancing and wearing masks here are the first at the beginning of the pandemic. And, according to locals, the benefits of a vaccine are temporary. They have become apparent.
Dr. Willis has also capitalized on his years of fighting vaccine hesitancy. Anticipating that Marin’s parents might resist vaccinating their children, he administered covid vaccines to children ages 5 to 11 largely in schools.
He hoped that occasions on campus, where music was played, decorated with balloons and even convenience dogs were brought, would be less intimidating than going to the doctor. In the first two weeks of the vaccine rollout for children aged five to 11, 40% of the children in this age organization had won their first dose of the Covid vaccine, partly at school events.
Now, Marin County’s Covid vaccination rate among all citizens is 91%, to 68% nationally.
The county has also lost its reputation as a vaccine haven in part because of vocal resistance that has taken root elsewhere. Marin County has been accused in the past of having a 78 percent formative year immunization rate. Now, almost every county in America has a lower Covid vaccination rate among children.
The anti-vaccine movement was once a position in which the left met the right, but the increased polarization of the pandemic has made that mix difficult to maintain, said Jennifer Reich, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado Denver and author of “Calling the Vaccines: Why Parents Refuse Vaccines. “
“When we start looking at other data resources about the dangers of covid infection, you start to see other people making other decisions in their lives,” Reich said. “The vaccine and clinical experience have become politicized. “
Ms. Schiffman said her children were given the Covid vaccine because they wanted to be able to go to camp, concerts and the climbing gym with their friends. Without their vaccinations, they can’t enter restaurants and other places because they require consumers to show vaccination. Cards. She said she might think about moving if life has become even harder to navigate without evidence of vaccination.
“I’m going to put a vaccine back in my framework,” Schiffman said. “Would that mean separating my family? It could. “
The cultural shift in Marin has been so dramatic that many new parents are suffering from how the county gained its notorious reputation.
Dana McRay, a Corte Madera resident who recently took her 3- and 5-year-old daughters to get vaccinated against covid, said she had “never met anyone who is against vaccines, or at least who talks about it. “
At a local Facebook organization for parents to which Ms. McRay belongs, a mom recently asked if anyone would have a date to play with her unvaccinated children. and take your order there.
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