August 12, 2021 – When it comes to the public gaining more confidence in the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, local doctors have an important role to play in mitigating hesitancy, according to Dr. Gerald E. Harmon, President of the American Medical Association. That was one of several takeaways from Dr. Harmon in a recent #scheinchats YouTube video, where the AMA president spoke with Stan Bergman, Chairman and CEO of Henry Schein, about how the pandemic will continue to shape health care for years to come.
“Historically, we’ve had nothing to match this pandemic,” Dr. Harmon said. “And so we didn’t have the urgency to develop the vaccines and use that as an offensive weapon against this devastating virus. Now that we have them, the vaccines are absolutely effective. They’re incredibly safe. They’ve been rapidly developed with good technology, shelf technology that was already there, but we’ve never had a pandemic that allowed us to move through the bureaucratic and regulatory barriers that existed in previous vaccines over the years.”
However, Dr. Harmon said there’s a lot of misinformation out there regarding the vaccines. That’s where local doctors come in. “What people do, and we have studies that show this, they trust their local doctors, their family doctors, their frontline physicians to give them sound advice, to provide them good healthcare, and in the case of the vaccine, to give them the right defense against this virus.”
Indeed, a recent survey highlighted by Becker’s Hospital Review showed that 70% of Americans trust their physicians.
Dr. Harmon said local physicians need to be put front and center so that they can speak to their patients and simply administer the vaccine as they do with so many other vaccines.
Whereas the nation had to rely on mass vaccine sites in the initial ramp-up of vaccine distribution, the logistics have significantly improved for more physicians or practically any physician that would like access to these vaccines in their practices, Dr. Harmon said.
“It’s truly a remarkable achievement, a remarkable public-private partnership that we in this country obtained this vaccine, got this vaccine through the regulatory process in record speed. And these vaccines are effective.”