Taking Healthcare by Storm: Industry Insights with Karen Ernst

In this captivating episode of Taking Healthcare by Storm, delve into the world of expert insights as Quality Insights Medical Director Dr. Jean Storm engages in a thought-provoking and informative discussion with Karen Ernst, MA, a nationally-recognized expert in vaccine confidence with a decade’s experience in grassroots organizing around the issue.

Learn more about Voices for Vaccines.

If you have any topics or guests you'd like to see on future episodes, reach out to us on our website. 

This material was prepared by Quality Insights, a Quality Innovation Network-Quality Improvement Organization under contract with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Views expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect the official views or policy of CMS or HHS, and any reference to a specific product or entity herein does not constitute endorsement of that product or entity by CMS or HHS. Publication number 12SOW-QI-ARPA-021425-GK

Transcript

Welcome to "Taking Healthcare by Storm: Industry Insights," the podcast that delves into the captivating intersection of innovation, science, compassion, and care. 

In each episode, Quality Insights’ Medical Director Dr. Jean Storm will have the privilege of engaging with leading experts across diverse fields, including dieticians, pharmacists, and brave patients navigating their own healthcare journeys. 

Our mission is to bring you the best healthcare insights, drawing from the expertise of professionals across West Virginia, Pennsylvania and the nation.

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 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Taking Healthcare by Storm. I am Dr. Jean Storm, the medical director at Quality Insights. And today I am thrilled to have Karen Ernst. She is a nationally recognized expert in vaccine confidence. With over a decade of experience in grassroots organizing and a background in writing and literature, Karen has pioneered new approaches to communicating the science of vaccines, something that is so very important right now.

I'm going to say in terms of public health, I think this is probably the most important issue, um, currently. So as a leader of Voices for Vaccines, Karen's work empowers families and individuals to make informed decisions about vaccinations and fosters communities that build confidence in the science behind vaccines.

We're going to dive into the challenges of vaccine hesitancy, the impact of misinformation, and how the COVID 19 pandemic has reshaped the conversation around vaccines. This is something that I am so excited to talk about. And Karen's insights are invaluable as we continue to navigate the road to better public health.

Karen, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. It's an absolute delight to be here. Great. So let's just dive right in. You've built a career as a nationally recognized expert in vaccine confidence. Could you share how your background in writing and literature has helped shape your approach to communicating the science of vaccines?

You know, I always tell people that the absolute best undergraduate degree you can get is the English major, and I'm not biased at all, but the reason I believe that is that you spend four years literally inside the minds of other people, in other characters, and you learn so much Empathy. And then when you have to write, you have to spend the time in the minds of your audience and figure out how they're going to receive your words.

And I think that exercise alone really primed me to be ready. To work in an area that is so fraught where there, where people have views that are so different from what you might think is obvious. And it helps me have a little more empathy, but mostly it helps me have some imagination about how other people might be thinking so that I can craft messages that really resonate with all manner of folks.

I love that. And I would agree. I'm a lover of fiction and I would definitely agree. So what inspired you to dedicate so much of your career to fighting vaccine hesitancy and how did your work with grassroots organizing evolve over the years? Right, it really started actually, I thought that for the rest of my life, I was going to be a high school English teacher, I was really ready to do it.

And I was on maternity leave, actually, when my older son turned five years old, and we were dropping him off at preschool and his little brother was 10 days old. And because it was his birthday, we stuck around and there was a biking party. The next day, the preschool called me and said, Your newborn baby was exposed to chickenpox, and which is a big deal, I should say, it's a big deal for a newborn to be exposed to chickenpox.

That's that's can be catastrophic. But when the mother of the child with chickenpox came back, I said, That's so weird that your child got chickenpox because they have the vaccine. And she looked at me and said, Well, that's really not important. Um, as in the vaccine is not important. And, uh, I learned everything I needed to know about my career in those few seconds, which was that whether or not you vaccinate is important to other people that you're not even thinking about at the time.

It is that Values around protection feel really personal and it's hard to make them generalized to our neighbors and our friends and our communities and the newborn babies that we actually care very much about. It's very difficult for us to see in that way. And because of that experience and other experiences that I had with a local measles outbreak and with the H1N1 And one pandemic, I really became quite, uh, caught up in the, I need to talk to people about vaccinating more.

And I kind of ended here accidentally, um, which is how the best careers are made by accident. But here I am, uh, still talking to people who. People who, uh, really look at their newborn babies and say, it's important to me whether or not my neighbor is vaccinated and people who think to themselves, well, chickenpox isn't a big deal.

Why would I vaccinate against that? Yeah. And I love that story. And I will agree. I think some of the best things in our lives happen just by surprise. So in talking about voices for vaccines, and I'm going to say, I took the becoming trusted untrusted messenger course yesterday, and I. I just love it. I mean, I've been talking about vaccines like my whole career and I learned so much in that course in things that I had not thought of before in talking to individuals about vaccines.

So Voices for Vaccines focuses heavily on empowering parents and building community around vaccine conversations. How does the organization approach engaging parents, individuals who may have doubts or concerns about vaccines? Right. It's really central to our values at Voices for Vaccines that we trust that regular people, the non science, non healthcare world, can understand the science of vaccines.

We trust that you can understand it. We trust that when you do understand it, you will see the value of vaccination. Um, the problem is getting people to that place so that they can understand the science of vaccines because there's so much garbage in the system coming at them, the system being our systems of information.

And while a lot of us might think, well, just listen to your doctor, that's not really how any of us make sense. any healthcare choice anymore at all. I know the moment that you get, that you and I and anyone else gets a diagnosis, the first thing that we do is we go to Google and we see what the Google machine tells us about it.

And we see what we can learn about it. And so why wouldn't a parent who's like, Hmm, vaccines, what do I do about this? Why wouldn't they go to the Google machine? So we really try to make that information readily available. On our website, on our social media platforms, our comms communicator Noah is even on TikTok.

He's the guy with the big fro on TikTok talking about vaccines. It's pretty wonderful. But then also, it's really, we know it's really important that people listen to people more. They know. And so we're trying to build this vast army of human beings who will talk to the vaccine hesitant people in their lives about vaccines with an understanding that they might have to explain how vaccines work, even though their last science class that they took may have been when they were in high school.

And so we really try to train people about how the vaccines work and how to describe that to other people too. So our website kind of does two things. It's for anyone who lands there to learn about how vaccines work. But it's also for anyone who needs to talk to somebody about it to learn how to talk about how vaccines work.

And you mentioned the Becoming Trusted Messengers course. Our other course that we have is called the Vaccine Quest because it's gamified. It's supposed to feel like playing a video game. But that's really Everything your average person could ever want to know about vaccines, how they're made, how they work with the immune system, what different kinds of vaccines there are, how they're tested for safety, how they, um, how we can read the studies about their safety, how we can evaluate the studies about their safety, how people make risk assessments about whether or not to vaccinate and what are the diseases we vaccinate against.

So. We're really throwing everything at everybody all at once and really catching people who are coming to us organically, but also sending people out with this big understanding and this very, uh, reasonable way of talking about how vaccines work with other people in their lives. Long answer. Good question.

Yeah, I, I will agree. And you know, you, we, you're talking about peer to peer communication. Um, so exactly. Why do you think that type of conversation is so important when it comes to increasing vaccine competence? Well, you know, they've done studies and there's been a number of studies that show basically the number of people in your life who recommend for or recommend against vaccines can influence whether or not you vaccinate.

In fact, it might be The most important predictor of whether or not you can vaccinate and one of those people in your life can be your doctor, but if there's another 20 people in your life for your friends, your family and your colleagues saying, Hey, don't vaccinate, you're very, very unlikely to vaccinate your Children anyhow.

And if you do it, you're probably doing it in secret, not telling people, right? Because you don't want to be the weirdo or the person who's going against the norm. And so that period, what, uh, let me back up. People who are against vaccines are much more likely to have a conversation with somebody about not vaccinating than people who go in, get their kids vaccinated and don't think about it until the next well child check, they're just not thinking about it.

They're not going to start a conversation about it. If a conversation starts, they're probably gonna be like, I don't know, talk to your doctor. But if we Actually encourage those peer to peer conversations that are positive. Yes. I got my kids, my flu shot today. I'm so happy about that. It's good. I'm posting pictures in the pediatrician's office.

Hey, we're here for a COVID shots this year. Hey, look at this. My kid's getting his pneumococcal vaccine, you know, whatever it is. Um, Hey, look at me. I'm getting my shingles shot. All of those things, the more normal we make them and the more we have those conversations, the better. out loud to people around us, the more normal vaccination becomes and the more the people in our lives are likely to get vaccinated.

And that should matter to us, not just because we care about them and we don't want them to die from, you know, meningitis or a heart attack or all these awful things and can follow these vaccine preventable diseases. But also because When more people around us are vaccinated, our vaccines actually work better.

You know, we're all rowing the boat in the same direction when we all vaccinate together. And so that's why that peer to peer conversation is super important, not just to encourage people to vaccinate, but really to make our whole communities healthier. Yeah, I love that. And I'm going to say vaccine hesitancy.

I've seen firsthand in my work in nursing homes. It's a such a complex issue. So from your perspective, what are the most common concerns or misconceptions individuals or parents have about vaccines? And how does your team at Voices for Vaccines address these challenges? Right. I will say the number one thing that people think about vaccines that is incorrect is that I don't need that vaccine.

And, you know, people think I'm going to say something like autism or cancer or something like that, but the really the number one thing I hear. And that we hear all over the world is I don't need that vaccine. I don't need to get a coven vaccine because I'm young and healthy. I don't need a flu shot because I'm young and healthy.

I've never had the flu before. Um, you know, I don't need a shingles vaccine because I don't. I've never seen shingles in my life. I don't know what that is. My child doesn't need a Hib vaccine because what is Haemophilus Influenza B anyhow? That they, that, and, and then, you know, a common one. My kid doesn't need an HPV vaccine because she's going to be a virgin until the day she gets married.

And clearly she's going to marry a virgin too because those are our values. So, That that unnecessary vaccine belief is really pernicious, and it's one that people don't address, and it's actually one that's not hard to address because you can say, Oh, you don't feel like you need a flu vaccine. I feel like I need a flu vaccine and then you use all these I statements and and you offer that to them.

And then, you know, you know, so what do you think of that and they'll be like yeah you need a flu vaccine and you know you plant those seeds and the next year like. I've got a flu vaccine again and see whether or not they think they still don't need one. Um, and I know people want these conversations to work quick, but it's really an overtime thing, but then beyond that.

Really, the second bucket that you can really put people into is I'm afraid of what's going to happen if I get vaccinated or if my child gets vaccinated, and it's all of these like side effects and rumors and misstatements and misconceptions and outright lies fall into that. I'm afraid of what's going to happen, and sometimes it's I am convinced of what's going to happen.

I know one of our former anti vaxxers that we work with at Voices for Vaccines, Heather Simpson, told me that she was convinced that if her child got a vaccine, her child would literally die. Like, she'd get the vaccine, and then she'd just fall dead on the floor, because that's how afraid she was of them.

So it's really hard to overcome that kind of vaccine hesitancy, which did, but it's really hard. Um, And then, you know, but then it might be a little something a little softer, like I'm not sure. I'm afraid my child could be diagnosed with autism. I'm not sure about that, though. And so because I'm not sure, I feel like the safest option is to not get vaccinated.

Because then I'm not actively doing something. So you can see like there's a really a whole spectrum of why I'm not getting vaccinated. I will say, though, even though I put everybody into two buckets, it's deeply personal for that individual that whoever is afraid of not getting vaccinated. Or afraid of getting vaccinated or not convinced they need to get vaccinated.

Their reasons are personal and they're usually deeply thought through. I know a lot of us think that it's just like, Oh, you watched a YouTube video and now you don't want to do it because you don't care about people. That's not how it works. It's really personal. And that's why, you know, you talk about becoming trusted messengers and what we call our 4A method.

That's why we always tell people that your first job is to ask questions, to ask, Oh. What, what are you afraid of and, oh, so tell me more about like what you've heard about that and really get into what is personal for them so that you can work through it with them at that personal level instead of doing, um, what I just did and just putting them into a bucket.

Yeah, I, I agree there. It's deeply personal. I'm talking to a lot of people about vaccines. That's what I've found. So one of your core values is that science needs to be understandable. To build trust because people don't understand something they may be afraid of it, and they're definitely not going to trust it.

So how does your team break down complex scientific concepts to ensure they're accessible and relatable to parents and caregivers? Right. This is really where my background as a non scientist is kind of my superpower, right? So. I started this journey because, you know, there was a parent who didn't want to get the chicken pox vaccine.

I continued it because, um, one of the parents at my son's school didn't want to get a flu shot because they have side effects. And so I had to go and look into these things. I looked into everybody's concerns. And really figure out what it meant. But I also, what I did is I went to experts and would question them thoroughly and have them explain it to me.

Now, you know, when an expert explains something to you, they're so deeply embedded in the science of it that they don't realize that they are explaining it with all sorts of jargon and with assumptions about what everyone must know about this. And so. I'm, I'm not timid about saying, hang on, I don't understand that, back up, do you mean this?

And I would have them explain it over and over again, and then when I could repeat it back to them in my own words, and they'd say, yes, that's correct, I'd be like, alright, well that, that's how we're, that's how we're going to talk about it to people. And the example I like to give is during the very early months of the pandemic, when we were first shut down, and they were talking about mRNA vaccines, this new vaccine technology.

I was actually fortunate enough to get to talk to Stanley Plotkin, and I said to, I said to Dr. Plotkin, can you explain to me how an mRNA vaccine works? Really honestly, not knowing entirely what mRNA was, to be, to be frank with you. Explain this to me. And he explained it to me, and I was like, Okay. I think I've got it.

I had to go back to him four more times to have him explain it to me. And by the time he was done, I said, okay, can I tell people that what it is, is that the, the vaccine is an instruction manual for your cell. It goes into your cell. It says to the cell, Hey, make a little like spiky thing on the outside of yourself that looks like this.

And then the, and then that's what your cell does. And then the. MRNA like gets attacked in killed by your immune system. He said, Yes, you could say that. And I was like, Okay, that is, that is how we will explain it to people that because that makes a lot of sense. But that explanation worked really well for me, because I did work with a few parents who are at vaccine hesitancy.

hesitant about those spike proteins and what those spike proteins were traveling around their body and doing. And I'd say you have to understand the vaccines given in your arm. And it's telling the cells in your arm to display those little spike proteins, those little spiky things on the, on the outside of the cell.

So almost all of the spike proteins are, are, Stuck there in your deltoid muscle on that cell. They're not traveling to your brain. They're not traveling to your unborn baby. Um, they are just sitting there waiting for your immune system to kill them off. And there were a number of vaccine hesitant parents that once they understood that they would say, Oh yeah, you're right.

You know, I just realized the vaccine couldn't do this thing that they're talking about, I guess I'm not afraid of that. So that science being understandable. Is really, really key. And when people do understand the science, it's really important. And there's no need for us to have this intellectual elitism about the science.

There's no need to make it jargony. There's no need to assume that everybody knows what mRNA is, even today. There's no need to assume that. Um, That we can still explain to people in, in terms that they understand about their bodies, how the science works, and not only can we, but I think it's really, really critical.

And I think it's really respectful of patients. They understand what's happening inside their body with this thing that we're putting into their bodies, especially when we're asking them to do that when they're healthy. Uh, you know, it's one thing when you, when you say, you know, we're going to, we're having this surgery for you.

You don't get it. You don't get an option on it because your body's literally exploding. So don't worry about it. But it's another thing when I'm sitting here, I'm healthy. I have time to think and reflect that I have the right to understand what's happening. Yeah, I love that story and breaking things down and making it easy to understand, you know, we hear a lot about misinformation these days.

Um, I try to like, just, I almost want to keep a journal about everything I've heard. And honestly, it seems that misinformation about vaccines seems to spread faster than the facts themselves. In your experience, what are the most damaging myths about vaccines and how do you work to combat them? Thank you.

Well, the most damaging myth about vaccines is the, the, what I call the autism lie. I label it the autism lie because it was built on fraud. We know it's not true. It is an absolute lie that vaccines lead to anybody becoming autistic. And it's really damaging. To autistic people and the families of autistic people to perpetuate this lie.

So that really is like, that's, that's my number one enemy is that lie.

And the fact that it's still around, it always, always perplexes me. I, sometimes I have this like deep sigh moment where I'm like, Oh gosh, we're back here again. Didn't we cover this already? Haven't we all been through this, but we haven't, we haven't all been through this. So here we are, we'll tackle it again.

It'll be fine. Everyone get on board. We're talking about vaccines and autism again. I agree. I feel the same. The nice thing though, is now when we talk about vaccines and autism, we know more about autism than we did when Andrew Wakefield was doing his, you know, press conferences and world tour and, you know, his media tour and whatnot.

We know more about autism. We know more about what the brains of autistic people look like. And we know that the parts of the brain affected, um, in the brains of autistic people. Those parts of the brain are developed before a person is born. And we know that the MMR vaccine cannot time travel back in time to when a person was born.

Developing in, in their mother's womb. And so we know that vaccines are not the cause, but because we know that much about autism, we know that, you know, it has strong genetic links that if there are environmental factors, those happen in the womb, we can talk more smartly about that and we can give people some answers.

Whereas before it was like, we don't know what causes autism, but it's not vaccines. That wasn't very. That wasn't very convincing. We have, we have some more, um, you know, tools in our tool belt to talk about it now. The one that is, uh, the one, the new one that is causing me heartburn lately is the cancer myth.

That particularly the COVID vaccine causes turbo cancers that it causes that it increases your lifelong risk of cancer over time. Um, even my mother came to me and said, I heard that, you know, if you get COVID, it can cure cancer. And I'm like, well, that's not true. But, uh, you know, all of these things that the idea of cancer are really being hooked into the COVID vaccine are, um, What we're battling the new thing that we're battling hard now.

And, uh, I, you know, I, I, I weep for us sometimes that we worry about that. And then we have such poor uptake with, uh, the vaccines that actually prevent cancer, like the HPV vaccine. Yeah. Yeah, I, I agree. So. I mean, maybe I know the answer to this, but maybe not. So how do you think social media and the internet have impacted vaccine confidence?

And what role is Voices for Vaccines playing in pushing against online misinformation? Right. Yeah. Uh, social media is absolutely destroying the fabric of our democracy. And I don't mean to say that in, uh, ways that sound, uh, hyperbolic, but it really social media is, is ruining us and tearing us apart as, as human beings.

One of the problems with social media is that it rewards really high emotional content. So. If I'm talking about, Hey, get a flu shot and, and prevent the flu this year. That is not highly emotional content. Um, but you know, the nurse hiding in a closet saying, everybody, I just gave a flu shot to somebody and their eyes literally popped out of their head and caught on fire and these things are dangerous that will get you.

That will get you views. That will get you people sharing that content. And, uh, the angrier it makes somebody The more they're going to share it, and the more they share content like that, and the more that the people in your, in, that are connected to you on social media share that content, the more the algorithm knows to deliver you that kind of content, to deliver you that, you know, anti vaccine content, or that, you know, even the, uh, you know, low, uh, uh, Vaccine fringy stuff, um, and, and, and you just get delivered it more and more.

And, you know, I talked about the people around you and how they can make something look normal in social media that happens on steroids, because it's not just the 20 people in your life. It's the 900 people in your life. And if social media is. Only delivering you the voices of people who are talking against vaccines or worried about vaccines.

That's going to seem very normal and that's going to affect how you think about vaccines, even though you think you may have overcome peer pressure in eighth grade, you, you, you didn't. I always tell people I can prove this, wear a mask on an airplane and if you don't feel completely obviously weird about it, then you are a stronger human being than I am because whenever I mask on an airplane, like the desire to just take it off for a minute is really, really strong because of the social norm around me.

So what are we doing about that? Um, It's really tricky because the social media companies own all of the cards in this and are completely disinterested in this and in fact are pretty much, um, downplaying or, you know, not delivering any of our non emotional vaccine content to people who need it. So instead, we are really doubling down on that in person experience with people because sitting down and talking to somebody face to face, is still so, so, so much more powerful than reading a meme on Facebook.

That if someone sits down with you and they care about you and they have an empathetic conversation with you and they get you to understand the science, you can be inoculated in some sense. Against those memes. And so that's really what we're trying to do. And also to get people to, you know, hit back a little bit on social media, instead of being like, Oh, there's, you know, crazy uncle Joe sharing a meme again.

I always ignore him. Uh, to say, to say a little something like, Hey, you know, knowing how the vaccine works, um, I don't really see how this is possible. Can I share with you what I know about this and really, uh, getting into that conversation on social media too, so that people. aren't just taking everything they see at face value.

It's so hard. It's so hard. It would be so much easier if the social media companies Put some value on the truth and really valued public well being, not just public health, but public safety, public well being, all of those things. And, uh, they don't right now. And so we really, it's, it's sort of an all hands on deck scenario where nobody can ignore it at this point.

We all need to be having these conversations in person and you know, if possible online too. Yeah, definitely. You know, I feel like the COVID pandemic Was like the, the turning point in, in, you know, the story of vaccine. We know that the pandemic had a profound impact on vaccine acceptance. How did your work change during the pandemic and what lessons were learned in trying to address vaccine hesitancy related to COVID 19?

Right. You know, I actually always disagree with people about that. I always tell them that the turning point was like five years or before the pandemic. And that's when all of the pieces were set into place for the pandemic, that the anti vaxxers, and when I, when I talk about anti vaxxers, I really want to be clear that these are people who are against vaccines.

They're against vaccines for themselves, they're against vaccines for everybody. They don't want anyone vaccinated, and sometimes they want to make it impossible to get vaccinated. So the anti vaxxers really started putting those, those, those Pieces into place, you know, about five years before the pandemic with doing things like becoming embedded in our political systems, uh, raising a lot of money, having alternate.

Media systems coordinating with each other and getting messages that they were able to get into our political systems very early on, so that when what happened with the pandemic wasn't that they changed course, or they did anything different or, um, anything new happened. What happened with the pandemic is everybody now all of a sudden was focused on vaccines.

Whereas before almost no one was. And so it really infused their work that was already going. It infused it with energy. It was just sort of like, you know, feeding the monster. So all of these, you know, the talk of medical freedom, that was old for them. They had been talking about medical freedom for a long time, and they had been talking about medical freedom in state legislatures, at school boards, in The halls of Congress and, you know, with governors, with attorneys general for years and years and years.

So when they took up the mantle of medical freedom again, they were saying words that were recognized in places of power and people were agreeing with them because they didn't understand necessarily what they were agreeing to. And, and that's really, that's really where the pandemic took off. Um, and what happened is that people who suddenly were like, yeah, you can't tell me what to do, which was really, uh, an inelegant way of saying, I'm really worried about my job and my children right now.

And I don't like what's happening and I'm blaming you. So the, you can't tell me what to do. I have, you know, there should be medical freedom. That message. Brought some people in permanently. And they were like, you also can't tell me what to do about measles. That's my choice. You can't tell me what to do about the flu.

You can't tell me what to do about HPV, about chicken. You can't tell me what to do about any of these things. I'm really like, I'm really still very, very mad about what happened to me and my job and my family and my wellbeing during the pandemic, other people were like, eh, I was really just worried about COVID and they were able to sort of walk away and walk back to it.

And that's why we still have about 90%. Of parents still getting their kids vaccinated for school. Otherwise we would only have what 50 percent of parents getting their kids vaccinated from school, but not everybody walked away with the anti vaxxers, but enough people did enough. People did enough. People were permanently converted.

And now we're sitting in a situation where. Many, many communities fall below what we call the herd immunity or community immunity levels and are primed for an outbreak. So, you know, in any community, think of like a classroom as a community or a school as a community, or even a small town as a community.

Any of those places that fall below 95 percent of people being vaccinated against measles. Is primed for the measles virus to circulate in that community, and there are communities where the rates are as low as 30%. And those are communities where they get recurrent measles outbreaks, and we're just we're inching closer and closer to a time where measles is always here measles is endemic.

And it's just always circulating and that would be, uh, really, that would be a dereliction of duty of every single citizen who has this free, freely available, easy, safe way of preventing measles. So, that's, that's my read on the pandemic. Um, they've been preparing for, for a long time and we were not. very much.

Yeah, I, that's a really, that's a great perspective, but I really appreciate that you sharing that. Like, I never saw it that way. So looking ahead, I'm, I'm sure you're seeing big challenges and potentially opportunities. I try to always see, like, there's going to be challenges, but there's also going to be opportunities.

So. What do you see as the biggest are the biggest challenges and opportunities in continuing to build vaccine confidence and address hesitancy? And how can organizations like Voices for Vaccines continue to support communities in this area? Absolutely. I mean, the challenges are That the lies are not going away.

We're never going to vanquish the lies. We're never going to be, I used to tell people, Hey, put me out of work, get everybody in your community vaccinated. And then people would be like, why is she around? And I'll, you know, I don't know. I'll go back to teaching English in a high school classroom. I don't know what I'll do.

I'll be a barista at Starbucks. I don't care. I'd be so thrilled to be put out of work. I don't think that anyone is ever putting me out of work at this point, sadly, um, until I've retired and I will retire. Uh, but, um, The big thing is looking at the opportunities, because if we just look at the challenges, we're going to feel defeated ahead of time.

And there's no, no reason to feel defeated ahead of time. Because let's, let's look at the reality of what we have. We have some really wonderful vaccines that have Improved the lives of our communities and improved the lives of children all over the world. Every time we go to a soccer game and watch a kid, kids playing soccer, and there are children playing soccer without, you know, disability from polio, um, children who are alive, who might not otherwise have been alive, children with asthma, who are still able to play soccer because, you know, pneumonia hasn't.

Taken that away from them. Whenever we see that that is a victory that we've had. And because we have these wonderful vaccines, we will continue having those victories and remembering always that our number one enemy. Is the disease. All of these diseases are our number one enemy, and that is what we're trying to defeat.

And if we remember that we know that we are on the side of good and right, and that we certainly can do a lot. To get rid of these diseases. We could eradicate not only polio, but we could eradicate measles from the planet. We could eradicate rubella from the planet. There are all sorts of diseases we could entirely get rid of.

And that's where our opportunity is now. Is to really build communities, help people see how interconnected they are and feel good about interconnect, how interconnected they are instead of feeling guilty about it or feeling like they're weak because they have to be interconnected with people to feeling pride about, I am connected to you and that's a good thing because I care about you.

How people see that, how people really. Know that you trust them to understand science. And, and you know, the, the thing, the big opportunity that we have now is that after the pandemic, nobody wanted to talk about vaccines anymore. Let me tell you. No one wanted to talk about vaccines. I'd be like, Hey, you wanna talk about vaccines?

And people are like, Ugh, no, blah. Okay, cool. 'cause that's all I have. Alright. But, uh. Now people want to talk about vaccines again, and they want to talk about not just the COVID vaccine right now we have at in this moment we have the opportunity to talk about polio and we've got Mitch McConnell talking about polio.

He could have been talking about polio his entire career because he's a polio survivor, but he's talking about it now we have people talking about measles again. Um, And people don't usually, even when they get their kid, the MMR vaccine, people don't think about measles, but they're thinking about these diseases and they're thinking about vaccines.

So take this opportunity to really check in with people and make sure they understand, um, they understand well how those vaccines. Work, how they create community protection for all of us and, and really, you know, let's, let's make evangelists of everybody so that everyone's having these conversations right now, because now is the time people want to talk about it again.

Yes, let's all become evangelists. Let's last question. How can people find out more information about voices for vaccines? Well, the best way is to go to voices for vaccines dot org. You know, I always tell people like set aside like 15 minutes to go through our website because we have made all sorts of free, wonderful things for you.

The other tip I like to tell people is there's a little search button in the upper right hand corner. If you're ever stumped by something. Search for it on our website. We probably have covered it. Excellent. I love this conversation. Karen Ernst, thank you so very much for being with us today. I feel good that there are people in the world like you out there talking about vaccines.

That's so kind. Thank you so much for having me. 

Thank you for tuning in to Taking Healthcare by Storm: Industry Insights with Quality Insights Medical Director Dr. Jean Storm. We hope that you enjoyed this episode. If you found value in what you heard, please consider subscribing to our podcast on your favorite platform.

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