In Missouri, some people are trying to get vaccinated in secret, a doctor says.
The Covid-19 vaccination effort has become so polarized in Missouri that some people are responding to the state’s Delta-driven surge by trying to get shots in secret, a doctor there said.
In a video circulated by her employer, Dr. Priscilla A. Frase, a hospitalist and the chief medical information officer at Ozarks Healthcare in West Plains, Mo., said this month that several people had pleaded for anonymity when they came in to be vaccinated, and that some appeared to have made an effort to disguise themselves.
“I work closely with our pharmacists who are leading our vaccine efforts through our organization,” she said, “and one of them told me the other day that they had several people come in to get vaccinated who have tried to sort of disguise their appearance and even went so far as to say, ‘Please, please please, don’t let anyone know that I got this vaccine.’”
It was not clear how many people had tried to alter their appearance to avoid recognition, or how they had done so. Dr. Frase, who wore a mask in the video, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Some people, she said in the video, are “very concerned about how their people that they love, within their family and within their friendship circles and their work circles, are going to react if they found out that they got the vaccine.”
“Nobody should have to feel that kind of pressure to get something that they want, you know,” she added. “We should all be able to be free to do what we want to do, and that includes people who don’t want to get the vaccine as well as people who do want to get the vaccine. But we’ve got to stop ridiculing people that do or don’t want to get the vaccine.”
Missouri’s vaccination rate is lagging. According to a New York Times database, 41 percent of Missouri residents have been fully vaccinated, compared with more than 49 percent nationwide. In Howell County, Mo., where Ozarks Healthcare and Dr. Frase are based, only 20 percent of residents are fully vaccinated.
On Thursday, Missouri reached a seven-day average of nearly 2,500 new cases of Covid-19 — an increase of 39 percent over the previous two weeks. Hospitalizations were up 38 percent over the same period.
In March, when covid cases began spiking around India, Bani Jolly went hunting for answers in the virus’s genetic code.
Researchers in the UK had just set the scientific world ablaze with news that a covid variant called B.1.1.7—soon to be referred to as alpha—was to blame for skyrocketing case counts there. Jolly, a third-year PhD student at the CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in New Delhi, expected to find that it was driving infections in her country too.
Because her institution is at the forefront of covid research in India, she had access to sequences from thousands of covid samples taken around the country. She began running them through software that grouped them according to branches of covid’s family tree.
Instead of dense clumps of B.1.1.7 cases, Jolly found a cluster of sequences that didn’t look quite like any known variant, some of them with two mutations of the spike protein that were already suspected to make the virus more dangerous.
Jolly talked to her advisor, who suggested that she reach out to other sequencing labs around India. Their data, too, showed signs that a local outbreak had given rise to a new family of the virus.
Before long, journalists got wind of the new development, and Jolly began to see articles about “double mutants” and the “Indian variant.”
She knew researchers could do more with a useful label than a "scariant" nickname. So she went to the place where a small group of scientists give new variants their names: a GitHub page staffed by a handful of volunteers around the world, led primarily by a PhD student in Scotland.
Those volunteers oversee a system called Pango, which has quietly become essential to global covid research. Its software tools and naming system have now helped scientists worldwide understand and classify nearly 2.5 million samples of the virus.
In April, Jolly posted on the GitHub page about what she'd found in the sequences. (She was the second user to flag the new variant; the first flag had been waved a few days before, by a researcher in the UK.) The Pango team looked up the genomes in public sequence database GISAID and agreed there had been a significant change to the virus. They quickly gave the strain a new name: B.1.617. That family has since grown to include the infamously transmissible variant known, in the media, as delta.
“Pango makes it really easy to see if other people are seeing what we’re seeing,” Jolly says. “If they’re not, it is really easy to report what’s being seen in India, so people can track it in other regions.”
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